The Poet and Society

...Sometimes he goes too far, but in the main his arguments are, I believe, quite valid...

...Second-class "formalists" have been showing their superiors how zealous they are by "being superior about Peter," and some of Viereck's less plausible supporters have been using him to attack T. S. Eliot and his followers...

...If you opposed the award, you were an anti-poet...

...I wish now that he would follow up this book with some careful, considered and unhurried reflections on the philosophical and ethical problems underlying these provocative essays...

...In this essay, Viereck sets forth his considered views about the whole affair...

...He divides the pro-award group into three classes: (1) those who agree with Pound's anti-Semitism...

...The result has been that, ever since 1949, no one has been able to read Viereck without being either for or against him before opening the book...

...if you supported it, you were a fascist...

...Therefore, I am grateful that he has chosen to publish "Pure Poetry, Impure Politics: The Implications of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Controversy" as the first of the four essays contained in his new and attractive little book...

...The literary style in this last essay is the smoothest and most orderly of all four in the book...

...and "The Poet in the Machine Age," a delightful little summation of the relation between the poet and industrialism...

...When he gives in to it, his prose is marred by repeated interjections and asides, which seem strange when written by the author of such beautifully subdued poetry as "Arethusa: The First Morning" and "Stanzas in Love with Life and August...

...Viereck's own chief danger from the machine age is the temptation presented by the two parenthesis keys on his typewriter...

...Being a "formalist" myself, I have a few reservations about Viereck's position and his tactics, but I believe he has said more of truth than most persons would care to admit...

...He feels that Pound and Eliot have inspired a host of second-rate imitators and cultists who are choking the life out of much of modern poetry, and he calls for a "third force" which would neither "demagogically popularize poetry, in betrayal of all integrity of standards," nor go in for "crossword-puzzle poetry which, whatever its fascination, would kill poetry by scaring away its audience...

...Art Versus Propaganda," the weakest in the book...

...2) those who don't, but who honorably appreciate Pound's genius (in this category he includes most of our best poets and critics), and (3) those whose literary affiliations and strategies dictate a defense of Pound because any undermining of Pound's stature automatically undermines their own interests as well...

...He feels it both unwise and unrealistic to try to separate "poetry" and "ethics...

...He says that it isn't merely a question of ugly politics marring Pound's Pisan Cantos: "Genocidal anti-Semitism is not, except ephemerally and superficially, politics at all, but a uniquely obscene anti-ethics, a metaphysics of satanism...

...Editor, "Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South" The award of the Bollingen Prize for American poetry to Ezra Pound in 1949 touched off a literary controversy that is only now beginning to subside...

...And if you had mixed feelings on the subject, you were feeble-minded and a coward...

...The other three essays in Dream and Responsibility are one on the German poet Stefan George, whose situation Viereck thinks is in some ways analogous to Pound's and to the supporters of the Bollingen award...

...In a time of so much cant and so many extreme views, it is good to have someone of Viereck's acuteness and integrity on hand...

...Viereck was against the award, and he said so in no uncertain terms in an essay in the Saturday Review...

...Among those actively engaged in the melee was Peter Viereck...