In the face of the modern crisis, both poets turn their eyes to the past and actualize history: every epoch is this epoch. But Eliot actually desires to return and reinstall Christ; Pound uses the past as another form of the future. Having lost the center of his world, he throws himself into every adventure. Unlike Eliot, he is a reactionary, not a conservative. In fact, Pound has never ceased to be a North American and he is the legitimate descendent of Whitman, this is, he is a son of utopia.... Pound's erudition is a banquet after an expedition of conquest; Eliot's, the search for a standard that will give meaning to history, stability to movement. Pound accumulates quotations with the heroic air of one who robs graves; Eliot orders them as if he were hauling in the relics of a shipwreck. Pound's work is a journey that perhaps leads us nowhere; Eliot's, a search for the ancestral home.
