In the face of the modern crisis, both poets turn their eyes to the past and actualize history: every epoch is this epoch. But Eli...ot 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare... At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically r...esolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so... necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere,... That each eyelash or hair Girdles; goes home betwixt The fleeciest, frailest-fixed Snowflake; that's fairly mixed With, riddles, and is rife In every least thing's life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The head withdraws into its hatch (a boy's), The engines rise to their blind laboring roar,... And the green, made beasts run home to air. Now in each aspect death is pure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »