Toynbee Over Pound Any Time

OPENING UP QUESTIONS

Pound...presents us with a paradigm of the relation of poetic form to ideology and of modern poetry�s relation to history. And, in the process, it is impossible to avoid religious perspectives. -Peter Brooker, A Student�s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p.227.

Seventy years of writing The Cantos

and 800 pages later

he has produced

this paradigm of paradigms.

Personally, I find Toynbee�s poetic form

more fertile as a way of stating my relation

to poetry and history

within some paradigmatic setting.

The notion of oneness in its central place,

the single motif threading its way through

the wondrous, mysterious movement of history

as: vision, principle, dogma, emotionally potent

concept whose time has come

in an infinitely complex and intangible process,

meticulously plotted, perplexing, a posteriori,

a priori, evocatively worded, technically superb

in a magnum opus too big for most:

painting the whole canvas of history...

a huge theological poem in prose,

a director setting all of history in motion

with its appearances, masks, observations, images,

immensity and wonder where historical certainty

is found within an endlessly deferred

and supremely complex matrix

whose end hath no end:

sceptical, scholarly, imaginative, sympathetic,

opening up questions not closing them down:

always there are questions, endless questions,

always there are words, endless words,

God could not have made it more complex--

and yet simple, so simple and simpler--

Ron Price

21 October 1995