Vince Sherry’s Peer Seminar, St. Louis 2024
Excerpts for your consideration:
From TSE Complete Prose:
Volume 1
Page 408
Whatever our reaction upon Mr. More’s book, it must be admitted that his philosophy is much more akin to intellectual revolution than is most of what passes current for liberal thought in America; if, as may be asserted, the only real revolutions are revolutions in ideas. Mr. More preaches, rather than argues; and when one disagrees with him, he has always the merit of being irritating.
Page 462
When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat’s worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement.4 The theory which sold the wares may be quite false, or it may be confused and incapable of elucidation, or it may never have existed. A mythical revolution will have taken place and produced a few works of art which perhaps would be even better if still less of the revolutionary theories clung to them. In modern society such revolutions are almost inevitable. An artist happens upon a method, perhaps quite unreflectingly, which is new in the sense that it is essentially different from that of the second-rate people about him, and different in everything but essentials from that of any of his great predecessors. The novelty meets with neglect; neglect provokes attack; and attack demands a theory. In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally out of the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory; this would be a society with a living tradition. In a sluggish society, as actual societies are, tradition is ever lapsing into superstition, and the violent stimulus of novelty is required. This is bad for the artist and his school, who may become circumscribed by their theory and narrowed by their polemic; but the artist can always console himself for his errors in his old age by considering that if he had not fought nothing would have been accomplished.
Certainly if a spontaneous revolution is possible, if it is possible for a whole generation, and not merely an isolated individual here and there, to arise as one man to wring the neck of rhetoric, one would expect, as is indeed the case, that the various volunteers should come variously armed.
Essay on Pound:
So much for the imagery. As to the “freedom” of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:
Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out “major form.” A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form-combination. An attempt to restore this sense is branded as “revolution.” It is revolution in the philological sense of the term. . . .
VOL 2
In this conspectus, it is necessary to look also at the changes which have taken place in Ireland and America. Forty or thirty years ago the Irish influence on London was potent and valuable. After the collapse of the society in which Wilde was the most prominent member, the chief survivor was
Page 485
Mr. Yeats. Although he remained domiciled in London, Mr. Yeats absented himself in the spirit, and often absented himself in the flesh, to devote himself to the work of the Abbey Theater, in Dublin.11 Minor Irishmen of letters tended to remain in Ireland: Synge was celebrated as an Irish artist using Irish material; and the literary activity of those years in Ireland had its part in inspiring the Irish Revolution of 1916.12 But London had little to tempt Irishmen to exile. It is admittedly fantastic but emphasises my point, if I say that the trial of Oscar Wilde led to the constitution of the Irish Free State.13
LIGHT FROM THE EAST Page 569
I was prepared to find in Mr. Trotsky’s book [Literature and Revolution] an exposition of a culture repellent to my own disposition; but I hoped that it would be distinct and interesting.9 A revolution staged on such a vast scale, amongst a picturesque, violent, and romantic people; involving such disorder, rapine, assassination, starvation, and plague should have something to show for the expense: a new culture horrible at the worst, but in any event fascinating. Such a cataclysm is justified if it produces something really new:
Un oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui.10 It is not justified by the dreary picture of Montessori schools, playing fields, plasticene, club-houses, communal kitchens, crèches, abstinence from swearing and alcohol, a population warmly clad (or soon to be warmly clad), and with its mind filled (or in process of being filled) with nineteenth-century superstitions about Nature and her forces.
Page 872
The Renaissance Platonists were inferior philosophers to the scholastics of the thirteenth century. Scientific thinking displaced philosophic thinking. If the scientists of the seventeenth century have their descendants, so have philosophers like Pico della Mirandola. We must therefore not think of the change in terms of progress or decay, but as a dissociation of the medieval mind and the formation of new types. There are signs – quite apart from the revival of scholasticism – of an analogous “revolution” coming to pass in our own time.
Volume 3
One of the ideas which characterizes our age may be called The European Idea. It is remarkable first because of the variety of its appearances; it may take the form of a meditation on the decay of European civilization by Paul Valéry,2 or of a philosophy of history such as that of Oswald Spengler, or it may appear allied with an intense nationalism as in the work of Henri Massis.3 It is remarkable second in that it is primarily an appeal to reason rather than an emotional summons to international brotherhood. It has no obligation to the thought of Romain Rolland, to nineteenth-century socialism, or to the humanitarian sentiments out of which the League of Nations arose; and it has as yet no direct connection with the League and no perceptible influence upon it. It owes its origin probably to a new feeling of insecurity and danger; it goes to prove that the most important event of the War was the Russian Revolution. For the Russian Revolution has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe as (in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent.4 And this awareness seems to be giving rise to a new European consciousness.
Page 157
The man of letters of to-day is interested in a great many subjects – not because he has many interests, but because he finds that the study of his own subject leads him irresistibly to the study of the others; and he must study the others if only to disentangle his own, to find out what he is really doing himself. Three events in the last ten years may be instanced: the Russian revolution (which has also directed our attention to the East),
Page 287
the transformation of Italy (which has directed our attention to our own forms of government), and the condemnation of the Action Française by the Vatican. All of these events compel us to consider the problem of Liberty and Authority, both in politics and in the organization of speculative thought. Politics has become too serious a matter to be left to politicians.3
Page 322
I have, in recent years, cursed Mr. Pound often enough; for I am never sure that I can call my verse my own; just when I am most pleased with myself, I find that I have only caught up some echo from a verse of Pound’s.
The term vers-libres, never a happy one, is happily dying out. We can now see that there was no movement, no revolution, and there is no formula.3 The only revolution was that Ezra Pound was born with a fine ear for verse. He has enabled a few other persons, including myself, to improve their verse sense; so that he has improved poetry through other men as well as by himself. I cannot think of any one writing verse, of our generation and the next, whose verse (if any good) has not been improved by the study of Pound’s.
The Literature of fascism essay in vol. 3
For a citizen of any country, who has definite political views, is always apt to believe that his fellow citizens of other views, when they behave in an unpleasant way, do so because their views differ from his. In one context, we exaggerate the differences of political parties and ignore race; just as in another context we may exaggerate the differences of race. The Russian Revolution, seen from a distance, appears far more Russian than revolutionary; possibly the fascist revolution is more Italian than fascist.
volume 4
We have been told by many philosophers that the world has no design and no purpose; we have seen the revolution of peoples and the downfall of monarchies with very little apparent good coming of it; we see vast machinery for production, and destitution in the midst of it; we hear vulgarization of taste applauded under the name of education; profligacy of manners acclaimed as an advance of civilization; trifling amusements and unnecessary luxuries heralded as a rise in the “standard of living”; and there are at least two million among us who have every excuse for thinking that they are not wanted at all.7 . . . I believe that all our problems turn out ultimately to be a religious problem.8
A Commentary
The Criterion: A Literary Review, 12 (Jan 1933) 244-49
Writing from a country in which communistic theories appear to have more vogue among men of letters than they have yet reached in England, I have recently looked at two books which discuss the relation of literature to social affairs.1 One is not very new; Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution was first published in translation in 1925, and has since become a text-book for revolutionary litterateurs. The other, Mr. Calverton’s Liberation of American Literature, is pretty fresh from the mint.2 The former is much shorter and of course more important. It is natural, and not necessarily convincing, to find young intellectuals in New York turning to communism, and turning their communism to literary account.3 . . . There is no such obvious reason why a man like Trotsky should take the trouble to pronounce upon the literature of revolution and the literature of the future; the only reason that occurs to me in reading his book is that he may have been exasperated by the futilities of previous Russian writers upon the subject. He is certainly a man of first-rate intelligence, expressing himself in a rough and ready metaphorical style, and he utters a good deal of sound sense. Most of his book is devoted to the criticism of authors whom I have not read, and who I imagine have not been translated and never will be; but as an antidote to the false art of revolution his treatise is admirable. . . . 4
Page 677
There is a striking contrast between this conception of art as a handmaiden, and that which we have just observed of art as a saviour. But perhaps the two notions are not so opposed as they appear. Trotsky seems, in any case, to draw the commonsense distinction between art and propaganda, and to be dimly aware that the material of the artist is not his beliefs as held, but his beliefs as felt (so far as his beliefs are part of his material at all); and he is sensible enough to see that a period of revolution is not favourable to art, since it puts pressure upon the poet, both direct and indirect, to make him overconscious of his beliefs as held. He would not limit Communist poetry to the writing of panegyrics upon the Russian State, any more than I should limit Christian poetry to the composition of hymns; the poetry of Villon is just as “Christian” in this way as that of Prudentius or Adam of St. Victor – though I think it would be a long time before Soviet society could afford to approve a Villon, if one arose.37* It is probable, however, that Russian literature will become increasingly unintelligible, increasingly meaningless, to the peoples of Western Europe unless they develop in the same direction as Russia.
Such reflexions as the foregoing arouse in me a strong protest against the title of a book by a Mr. H. R. G. Greaves (The Acorn Press: 5s. net) called Reactionary England.8 Mr. H. J. Laski has called this book “suggestive and illuminating” – a combination of adjectives which is neither illuminating nor suggestive. . . . What practical politician cares twopence about returning to a previous state of affairs? “Revolutionary” would be a more suitable word, as we now know that revolution is not always towards communism: but we have come to associate “revolution” with a violent and sudden reversal of government, rather than with a gradual and hardly perceptible concentration of power.
Volume 7
An important document in the history of the political direction of culture will be Leon Trotsky’s essay, Literature and Revolution, of which an English translation appeared in 1925.55* The conviction, which seems to be deeply implanted in the Muscovite mind, that it is the role of Mother Russia to contribute not merely ideas and political forms, but a total way of life for the rest of the world, has gone far to make us all more politically culture-conscious. But there have been other causes than the Russian Revolution for this consciousness.
address to the Milton Academy
Page 329
In the world of political revolution, we see men, so long as their party is a minority, neglected, oppressed or persecuted, devote themselves to a cause and hold themselves ready to become martyrs for it; and we see the same men, when they arrive at power, reverse their attitude, identify the cause with themselves and become in turn oppressors. And the point at which the change occurs may be so imperceptible that these men will remain completely unaware of it. It is, to me, wholly unintelligible that any man should want to be a leader. But then, I cannot understand anyone wanting to be a poet.
The effort of the first half of the twentieth century has been towards another revolution, towards finding a new idiom by exploring the poetic possibilities of the speech of our own time. It has been a revolt against the poetic diction, and also against the limited subject matter, of the “Victorians.” I have no doubt that the idiom and versification which we now call “modern” contain, like those of every previous period, the seeds of a new artificiality, and will end in verse as remote from the speech of its time as that of any earlier period of decline; but – if we continue to produce poets – I have also no doubt that the resources of the English language will be adequate for a new revolution.
