Ezra Pound, Adam Smith, Karl Marx

72 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW W.G. REGIER EZRA POUND, ADAM SMITH, KARL MARX As long as Ezra Pound was not responsible for a magazine's budget he could afford to regard pubUshing from an exclusively aesthetic viewpoint. Only after contendingwith the price ofpaper, typesetting rates, distribution costs, competitive prizes, tariff barriers, binding, postage, and advertising did he seem to appreciate the complex factors externaUy controUing art, opinion, and reputation. From the pubUcation of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), his first fuUlength critique, through Guide to Kulchur (1938) and beyond, Pound's writing foUowed two interweaving courses in his poetry and critical prose. The poetry, especiaUy Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and TAe Cantos, experimented with new concinnations of diverse traditions; the prose embodied Pound'sjudgment. Their most dramatic difference is that in his poetry, Pound goes his own way heedless of his audience while in his prose, he does his best to stay short, crisp, and clear. At the same time he was hailing condensation and clarity as the hallmarks of good writing inABC ofReading (1934), he pubUshed his digest of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in Eleven New Cantos, which begins: TEMPUS loquendi, Tempus tacendi the words of The Preacher: "a time to speak, a time to be silent." Pound felt it was time to speak. "Cannibals of Europe are eating one another again," he wrote (Canto XXXII), and devoted a page to a capsule history of Krupp munitions and those of JosephEugene Schneider, Krupp's French counterpart (Canto XXXVIII). The broader context ofEleven New Cantos decries arms sales, honors American ConstitutionaUsts, and comments on international banking. This second set of Cantos had expanded from the first by involving poUtical and economic features directly into the matter. Canto XIX had warned, "Can't move 'em with a cold thing, Uke economics," but Pound went ahead and tried. His experience with discouragement had built up his resistance to it: for the next REGIER 73 twenty years, economics was Pound's driving obsession. Some have complained that this crowded out the poetry: Pound himself recognized that economics was one of this century's crucial issues. It is one of Pound's signal achievements—the very greatest perhaps—that he incorporated economic history, theory, and incident into his poetry. Canto XL begins: Esprit de corps in permanent bodies "Of the same trade," Smith, Adam, "men "never gather together "without a conspiracy against the general pubUc." The Adam Smith quotation was used by Pound as early as 1920, in The Little Review, and several times thereafter: in "Murder by Capital" andJefferson and/orMussolini (both 1933), and "An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States" in 1944. It is to be noted that the quotation first appeared in prose, and was repeated most often in prose. Its presence in TAe Cantos demonstrates not only that Pound lay great stress upon it, but also that poetry was, by 1934, a vehicle open to the needs of didacticism. The repetition of quotation has an even deeper importance to Pound study: though it need not suggest obsession, repetitions of this sort represent limits. There is every reason to suppose that Pound's faith in condensation interfered with his ambition to convey complex truths. Once he had discovered a sentence that he felt summarized a writer's thought, Pound often ceased to explore that thought further, instead resting upon the summary as if it were the final word. Further, the quotation is anything but exact. It is a condensed version of Smith's words, abbreviated and rearranged to hyperbolize . What Smith wrote was less absolute: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the pubUc, or in the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the pubUc, or in some contrivance to raise prices."1 Pound was ever willing to bend quotations to the flow of his verse. Similarly, he said of Karl Marx: Marx has aroused interest far less than the importance of his thought might seem to have warranted. He knew, but forgot or at any rate failed to make clear, the Umits of his economics. That is to say, Marxian economics deal [sic] with goods...