8.01.2005

Reading Hall of Mirrors, by Peter Stoicheff. Monograph on Pound's last cantos (Drafts & Fragments).

Struck by the repeated word in Canto 116:

Many errors,
a little rightness,
to excuse his hell
and my paradiso.
And as to why they go wrong,
thinking of rightness
*
To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes,
I cannot make it flow thru.


(thinking of Mandelstam's (1930s) off-the-cuff, defensive "definition" of poetry : "the poet's sense of being right".)

Stoicheff's discussion of Pound's focus on the Confucian link between inner rightness, personal integrity, and general social reform. How the melodrama, the tragicomedy of his own life & actions forced him to confront this issue in a way he hadn't expected.

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