Wil, with the subject title of this thread, I wasn't trying to join
Pound & Life. It was sloppily written. I was just replying to something
specific David B. said under the former "Pound" thread.
Curious all this talk of coronations, Blake, angelic, & so on. At the
inaugural today (which was full of religion) GWB quoted a letter from
one of the 1776 generation in which he says something LIKE "have we
not been led by the presence of the angel in the storm"? I've just
been reading a remarkable book by Margaret Barker called The Great
Angel (her recent book on Revelations was just reviewed in TLS),
a re-interpretation of the terms like "the Angel of Yahweh" and so
on.
I think of Pound as prophetic in a certain way: like a man with a
demon, all on fire. What he produces is a cthonic
primordial man-image, the Old Man of Crete in Dante sort of.
Always the Old Man. As such he distorts the "angel" of American
purpose in a mysterious way: it's like looking at the internationalist
& global aspirations of American democracy through a fascinating but
sickly Venetian mirror.
The concept of poets as prophets or spokespeople for the particular
"guardian angels" of their tribe or nation, full of wrath & denunciation,
is palpable in your New Zealand remarks. What's interesting for the
next century is the clash between these cthonic local elements & the
ineluctable unity of the planet.
Henry
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