Browning's Sordello

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is it makes for a very strange, so that the Blacks enter our American speech at its own level. Inherit, identifiable, all the South speaks with a Black accent, as we've seen. So that, what's the first appearance of, what we're beginning to be aware of now, you were past the melting pot, where everything was going to become a world person. That's often still on my mind. Now we turn around and find out that you can't melt away and simply take over and encompass all the different groups, but you become a compound and have to admit their presence. If I get that across, especially here where we have, in a very short period, the first,

[01:07]

I thought of the Tassajara beginning, because you enter in with land and an actual church, the first real hole in which you find out you have an American Buddhism, potentially. We've also got the beginnings of American voodoo, and that appearing very much outside of a Black community. Remember, if it's ethnic, okay, that's very different. That's like a small Japanese group continuing with their Japanese Buddhism, which is not yet an American Buddhism, yet American Japanese can't have anything but American Buddhism when they have Buddhism. And that's part of this change. Pound, being of a generation, I know only too well from my parents, a lost generation, excluded from any possibility in their entire framework that the Jewish world was anything but an Aztec world.

[02:09]

And yet, the poet plunges through. Passages of Leviticus become absolutely primary in the canon. Okay, that's wasp. All of the Old Testament, in the American experience, just goes back to Massachusetts and the Puritan presumption that they are the true Old Testament script. It's the negative parts of Pound, the ones that scream Kike and so forth. It's at that point, the most painful, the most negative, the most poisonous. Well, let's picture it as a poisonous, because let's picture it in a body. He had no way for which the postulants not to rise and form an open wound, and a million other people walked around with no such wound visible. There is no passage in which, for instance, Pound's anti-Semitism doesn't arise, but his fear and horror of shit doesn't arise in that same passage.

[03:15]

And syphilis in his health passage is great. So we're talking about fantasy. I mean, I don't picture that the man, there's nothing about the man having syphilis. We might check it out. Maybe the doctors found it at St. Elizabeth's. But lesions are the first thing he thinks of, and metaphors, he was right. He strikes deeper than any other 20th century poet. If it weren't for the cantos, we would blithely assume, and disastrously, that in the major American poetic consciousness, we never suffered like the Germans did from anything as serious as showed up from heaven. We're somewhat aware. Hitler wouldn't be aware. I mean, he's the straight lesion, but a writer like Mann knew this must be more serious than this. This must go deeper. More than that, Mann knew this must go into European consciousness. Mann, since he was German, kept suspecting the German must be the one who brings this into European consciousness. And yet, think about today, when black is beautiful, Asian's marvelous, but European

[04:26]

mind is what we all, and we have a strong one in America, we want not to be the European mind. This is part of what we're going to be going back and talk about. So let me read the passage here. Our Elpenort is, by the way, could be any of that little group that Pound experienced killed in the First World War. I mean, it's underlined by how much he feels that. It, however, is prophetic of us because Pound is writing before the war with a great deal of feeling of the dead, the followers of Odysseus who died. And as Pound, by the piece in Kandos, Pound identifies himself with Odysseus. Not just the Ulysses that you meet in Homer's Kandos, but since Pound was a devout reader of Dante, that Odysseus in Pound's mind meant a man who was in hell because he had betrayed

[05:32]

his men, because he had betrayed his readers. He had led them astray. He had committed a terrible hubris, but he had led all his readers into the hubris. The despair of Pound over the Kandos himself enters into the piece in Kandos, deepens them. He knows he can't divide just the wonder and everything else in the poem. He feels he, in all the versions of it, he has some immediate human guilt, which he admits to at one time, and at a marvelous time. With Allen Ginsberg visiting him, he says, well, my damned anti-Semitism, yes, but his damned anti-Semitism is almost necessary. Many people, other people, have the same damned anti-Semitism. It must be a universal act. It was. My parents had it, but it never showed up. They thought it was pretty wicked and burned people in ovens.

[06:33]

We're not really talking about that. Something much deeper than burning. People think of a million reasons to burn people in ovens, or fry up cities, and it's done over and over and over again. Those who have read Chinese history will have found Buddhists merrily. All you have to do is change the regime to three different religions, Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian, and over and over again you've got enough habit going on to whoever you name in periods of people burning. I think it's incidental to the burning. The death I'm talking about here is the death of hatred that cannot find the nature of its infection. It starts naming, and we find parts of it. But, he also felt though, he was still in the poem he didn't know the shape of, the same one he launched himself out on, and was some part of a tradition.

[07:38]

What he did do to find, so let's picture him not only, he's going back to find almost the shape of the voice he has to take in the poem when he returns to this. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, unburied, cast on the wide earth, limbs that we left in the house of Kierkeg, unwrapped and sepulchred, and toiled urged other pitiful spirit, and I cried in hurried speech, Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? Caves thou of foot, obstructing seamen, and he in heavy speech, ill-fate and abundant wine, I slept in Circe's angle, going down the long ladder, unguarded, I fell against the buttress, shattered the nape nerve, the soul sought a furnace. But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, heap up my arms, be doomed by seaboard and inscribed, a man of no fortune with a name to come, and set my oar up that I swung

[08:42]

mid-fellows. And then to Clercane, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Theban holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first a second time, why, man of Ilstar, facing the sunless dead in his joyous region, sand from the spalser, leave me my bloody bezel, for it suitsay, and I stepped back, and he, strong with the blood, said then, Odysseus shall return to spiteful Neptune over dark seas, lose all companions. Then Anticlea came, lie quiet, Phoebus, I mean that as Andreas Phoebus in officina, wellachy, 1538 out of Homer, and he sailed. So that's the moment that you will see when we come to Sardello, of lie quiet, where he's talking about Shalley, and it comes again in a poem. When we read essays that present cases like this, we're going to be returning these passages

[09:43]

on. This is almost an opening for what we'll return to in full and relate it back and forth when we come to the 9th of March. But when these are presented in papers, and I find them all helpful by scholars, is they unwind some of these things and show us these letters. Always makes it look as if somebody reading had picked up something, entered, here is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting absolutely, fit it in. They look as the scholar finds it. The scholar researches, and feels very excited because in a funny way the scholar comes into tune always at such time as a poet. You are searching again where you had been many times, so you are essentially researching. Or you are searching again where your tribe, as Pound called them, poets of the tribe,

[10:45]

where your tribe had been many times, so you're researching. The scholar is doing the same thing, he's looking through a whole material, he knows it's been looked through over and over and over again, and he finds the things that belong to what he experiences as his thesis. I'm talking about the very best of it. When you come to the level at which a scholar emerges in my mind at exactly the level of a poetic creative scholar, it would probably be a very few such books, Lowe's Representative is a great example. It's pure search, pure research search. There is a kind of thesis, but it launches almost like this launching out of the voyage of these poems, and it becomes more and more intricate in this sense of growing excitement through about the material of the poems. It's overwhelming, and at the end of it, Lowe's presents to us something that was meant to, in writing the poem, something we know is not

[11:57]

true, but in writing the poem is that it is. Coleridge had been to all these libraries. Yes, but he had unnervingly been through much more reading than would be apparent there. Experience that reading is what part of my, I want to get across in a way, and of course I'm going back, but it's my own experience. Experience in that reading, at times when things were experienced, read, in such a state of confusion you didn't know whether you read them or whether they were experienced somewhere else. They were so immediate to you. Now remember, a scholar in researching is engrossed, lost in what he's reading, and his intellectual attention is to at once be lost in what he's reading. If you come up and tap him on the shoulder, he doesn't feel the tap.

[12:59]

Consequently, he's in peril. Any animal who becomes engrossed with something is in very great danger indeed. This scholar, still in his engrossment, leaving the book, will walk in front of a car and be knocked out of control. Then we have death's car. So will the composer. We've got a couple of them who are in the middle of composition with that still in their mind, engrossed in that composition. This is not a death instinct. Life and death don't even signify. They simply are totally engrossed in what they were working in. That's the immediate reality, and all the ones that you would think of as biologically more important aren't. They're simply not present. I guess from that aspect of engrossment and an idea of research, I want to turn to the

[14:10]

main matter today, which is the business of how men poets relate to what appears as their material and tradition, and naming of it, and the experience of it, and change over. We're engaged in all modern poetry, I think, at first level with a world that has to do with reading, writing, writing, reading. And back of that, some early immediacy that voices heard, and stories heard, and bits and poems, however that goes, but probably I think it comes as voices heard, and must be a matter of temperament, and the tempering of an author. You move toward the art, the temperament toward the language itself, and toward events that

[15:10]

take place in language, seeming to have an ultimate reality, to be revealing something. And at the same time, however, emerging in an atmosphere of enchantment, in an atmosphere of being of the storyteller. I think, all right, I'm following my own feeling here. Where was it? People telling stories, I think, majorly, which might have, were probably just family stories. Those stories are great stories. My constant body of my poetry that moves around the matter of the supernatural or the occult is the realm that, no matter, although we beg the children to see a ghost, knock on wood once or twice, the greatest ghost of all, for sure, one of the ones that were in

[16:11]

stories or occurred in poems, and the most intense visitations or experiences are fine. But coming to the poem was a long journey through earlier times in which elements that belong to the poem were surrounded, in the society, surrounded. And one of them certainly was music, for instance. While in the speech, the speech had the attraction, many of the attractions of music, it was not yet a designed music. So that the first time you heard it, even, I'm trying to think now, people reciting poetry or reading poetry aloud, its first experience was what a strange, heightening, and total change, other kind of speech, an otherness, another, entirely other world coming forward. And yet what was in that world was not yet a significant thing.

[17:14]

There was some kind of speaking of that order. What was not there at all was an idea that there was a tradition, because what had taken its place, because I was not a poet. I think poets are more fortunate than painters. Painters often study in studios with other painters. In most of the history of painting, they study in the studio of a great painter, and they learn the techniques of the great painter, and then if they are painters themselves, have to go through a kind of insult to what they've learned in order to arrive at their own techniques. What's not understood about techniques is that while there are some basic things that you learn outside of the basic things in techniques, gaining another person's technique has to be de-gained, because you have got something you've got to do. It's a great misunderstanding in the modern world, because Pound make it new, was that

[18:18]

Pound had such an aptitude and love of being like something. Those of you who know my work know entirely what I'm talking about, because I've not shed any of my being like something. Yet, certainly I had to come to a voice that was mine, and to do that I had to undo what I had picked up monkey-wise by an aptitude. In other words, I learned your tricks, isn't it? Exactly. Pound loved these. And when we come to Robert Browning, one of the first things we'll see is one of the greatest artful dodgers of all time. Your quirks and tricks, that's what Pound had picked up and loved to pick up from people. It's just exactly that phrase, which is so right for this. But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks, let in your quirks and tweaks and

[19:21]

say that they're an art form. It is Robert Browning himself who talks about tricks in Sardello, if I can talk about tricks, about the things you learn. It's tricks that Sardello finds that are going to remove him from Shelley, from the sublime language of Shelley, so that he can come to the language of Robert Browning, even though he didn't have any danger of writing like Shelley. How do you get out from that commanding speech? In painting, over and over again, Giotto having to disown, hate. Giotto was accused of a kind of blasphemy in painting, of hating the preceding painting, because he made such a drastic change in painting that while Italians thought of him as a genius, they experienced him as being blasphemous, not in relation to religion, but in relation to the great pain of the Byzantine tradition. He broke with the traditional painting and made it an individual style.

[20:24]

But he had to break and disown his master, with whom he studied, and to whom he owed everything, supposedly, in technique. And the minute he started doing things that were not that technique, nothing he could have learned there, he was also discarding what he had learned there. Poets have a very different route. They do not study with other poets. They find their poetry and have certainly had a great advantage in that. This is not, however, true of the Cordello. It's since the written, printed poems that poets have this reason. And we find almost no poets who study with other poets. So we come to the abomination of the barbarians. And we check workshops. I'm looking at Mike McClure. And Mike McClure's first poem, Passages, oddly enough, I swiped the title for a poem,

[21:26]

a series of poems of mine. And that's nothing that Mike stole a lot of me. But he, meanwhile, wrote like a model member of my own workshop. In other words, he wrote, in passages, very much involved with the technical problems that I had at that time, writing letters. I wasn't going to write like that forever. And they have another meaning in my direction. But, verifiably, all you got when you went to a workshop were the problems that the person you're studying with had at the time. And they were pretty convincing. I mean, how did you phrase it this way? Meanwhile, any student could phrase it faster than I could. But they didn't have the difficulties. I mean, one of the things you learn when you're supposedly directing a workshop is that any smart person sitting out there can see your problem. They don't have your problem. It's like, you know, they can sit like a doctor and say, do it this way. I mean, you're the victim. You're the one with the damn problem, which is a different course.

[22:32]

That's the difficulty of workshops. But before this point, there are no workshops. And that's not how poets do it. So they find. They can still be, however, so haunted by Shelley that it's hard to. So they will be convinced by a powerful point. We have another step in growing up in my family is that they were educated, college educated. And while workshops are of a somewhat late date, the thing we call English literature is also, I guess, now probably a century old. Before that, you didn't have English literature. You didn't go to college to read poems and novels and so forth. And if you walked up to Shelley and told him, man, you're terrific. They're going to have a course called Romanticism and they're going to read to you, man. And so don't worry. Why don't you go fretting around here? Because she didn't say yes to you because they're going to be a million earnest girls reading over you.

[23:38]

They'll be reading you in high school. They'll even be reading you in the 8th grade. They'll have left the Bible and Bunyan behind. And they won't carry Shakespeare around like you did. They'll take a course in it and pass it. I mean, they'll graduate from it even. I love the puns, but they're part of what our education is. Most people graduate from poetry and they pass the course. And even for us poor contemporaries, we get our money for the fact that we're presented in courses. And we forget that the people who take the courses do exactly that. They've graduated from poems we don't even get to graduate from. We're still struggling with what went on in them. They've just qualified ten times over. So let's picture another thing. This is so incidental and yet since it's happened, there it is. It's part of the world we're in. And most of you will have come into, and so did I in the 30s.

[24:40]

I came into poetry because it was already there to be studied. I took freshman courses at Cal and survey courses. And then I guess it's in my sophomore year, I applied to the university anyway. But when I found myself in a survey course and we came to Milton, I was going, all right, I'm coming to Milton, but it's a survey course, man. And they were already on Shelley and I was still on Milton. I can see this is a fluke no matter what I do. I can't get off of this Milton cat. All the other courses were pretty exciting. I said I couldn't shift gears. You can't, nothing would go. So you can't take a survey. I went back to history where I was perfectly willing to survey and cover several centuries if I wanted to cover the whole field. No, poets before really found it, found their lead. In searching a literature, Milton's the first one to propose literature.

[25:42]

Even this is a short historical period. This is the period of reading and the period of the middle class I'm talking about. Shakespeare's day, he went and saw it on stage and the business of reading these plays and so forth, reading is still in the reading world, but many of those poems will exist in the manuscript handed around. And would be like a contemporary poem at the mimeograph pamphlet level. This world continues. But the one we've drawn today is deceptively a counterpart of one that poets had to have, was the naming of the poets that poets do over and over again. It's absolutely, well, let's go back to Milton's one, where Milton's sureness that Spencer is his predecessor would be a good example of it, but Milton's already setting up a literature. He has to sell to a Protestant parliament

[26:48]

that the state government can come in and do what kings used to do and have poets honor them. And it wasn't very convincing and rightly as far as I can see, for a bunch of London merchants to decide that England was going to have a treasury in poetry. A king had a personal treasury in the fact, the Tudors had a personal treasury in the fact that Shakespeare and Spencer and so forth would glorify a realm. But it's very hard to sell to a parliament that's just throwing kings out that they need glory when what they really want are their prophets. It's a fruitless battle across the whole era. And so a much larger con job, the poets essentially built in their minds what a king was. They could draw on quite a lot. The whole Bible could feed what a king was, and poets would create what a king and a queen is, a prince and so forth. They're entities, as a matter of fact, in poetry. It's not been that...

[27:50]

Poetry has not had a much harder picture allying itself with... The terms that it did ally itself with were treasury, treasure. That was still part of what the king had. Those things that the king had that the parliament took over. But is it worth my time? What does it profit you if you do so-and-so or questions that are accusations of poetry? As a matter of fact, the minute you ask that question, if you run to... The senator knows and the congressman knows that they're not going to be praised in poetry. It doesn't profit their time to have somebody out there scribbling about them either. This is the joke across history. But they are also inhabiting terms. The bleakness of this, the uneasiness of the poets' alliance, but mine, meanwhile, is not allied with this class.

[28:53]

Strikingly, the poetry of our time comes with very few exceptions, only from that same middle class, only from the bourgeoisie. In England, it breaks down so that it's outside of the London complex. Somebody who does not belong to... I'm thinking of the bourgeoisie being a person living... bourgeois living in the city of London and the city of... and allied somewhat with the industrial city, but growing up in that whole framework, the one that's described, for instance, economically in capitalism. That's talking about this economy that allows these cities to be bourgeois. And I think I'm right that only in our time... Gregory Parsons, at least in the generation I was growing up, was the only Lutheran proletariat. He's a Lutheran proletariat, not proletariat. The rest of them all graduated from Columbia and so forth. But we've already entered, I would think,

[29:55]

middle class consciousness of its own discomforts, which is what this book is going to talk about. What I'm getting at here is within this middle class, that a strange counterpart comes of the poet's feeling of belonging to a community in time. And what is raised is a thing called literature. Long before it's taught in school, the middle class educates itself and gains a culture. And you can hear Milton addressing the Parliament and convincing them that England must have a pride in its literature and that that Parliament will then be able to hold its own with kings and queens in Europe because their English literature will guarantee them where before their king, with all the attributes. And that's the same problems with architecture, same problems with the beauty of the city. And all of them have to do with the court

[30:59]

and with courtliness, by the way. The problem in religion where great cathedrals are built, wealthy orders like Franciscans build up great abbeys and so forth. And the other part of the religious world that wants no such show, well, we're talking about the show world in good part. We're not talking about the fact that poets can eat or not, but the fact that almost poetry is kept in this ambience of it. But it itself allies itself with the show, with grandeur, with the whole series of things. And since I still do, I'm going to be talking from that, but I will bring into question certain things of grandeur, of enchantment, things that belong to the world of a hierarchical order, of the feudal order preceding the capitalist order, and that can be called ghosts of a capitalist order. And the ghost story at the end of the 19th century is a place where,

[32:04]

beginning of the 18th century and through the 19th century, is very much how important the ghosts of a preceding order, the ancient ones, are disturbing all of Europe. The fact that Marx is a specter, is haunting Europe, is exactly the same feeling that Eliot has with something strange coming up out of the ground and terrorizing the very world. Marx is solidly bourgeois. I mean, it's bourgeois consciousness to feel the ghosts. When you come to working class, all they had to do was get unions, and it got a slice of the pie. It ain't got no ghosts. I mean, you can't tell them about specters. There's nothing spectral at all. They vote 1,000% for the next war, and if you keep on making armaments, they got a maid. And especially if you don't open up unions, some more people get in under their umbrella. So what is the... All right, the middle class is the one who makes the picture of the literature. But the literature is the counterpart of the tradition.

[33:06]

And the tradition has to do with the variety of what poetry is. And here I would go to the Darwinian principle in which the greatest variety means there's an instinct to know that the greatest variety produces the open possibility of the continuance of an art. It is as simple as the fact that if we do not have a great variety that we can call upon, all right, a Robert Duncan beginning, if he faced five authors, he would have been shit out of luck if there hadn't been something there that would be appropriate to his spirit. And only by opening all the way across time, and by opening a great community, some of which, by the way... So we have to look at more than masterpieces. If we look only at masterpieces and masters who arrive at times when everything seems to feed their spirit, and luckily greatness is easy.

[34:08]

We have no great poets at all in the 20th century. You only want to take Yeats and say it's great in the sense of Goethe or Shakespeare. It just doesn't matter. So we don't even have to worry. We don't have to be in this territory. Mann, I think, possibly of being great. Great doesn't signify. If we had only great, we would be, as Darwin observes, that's like if the poor horses had only great race-winning horses or great percheron carrying huge loads, they wouldn't have anything like the variety of possibilities. And what you're working with, meat and an art, are the variety of possibilities for individual souls to find their language. And that often means that the most valuable poetry may be 500 totally blah street poems written, which have only just a faint suggestion of what would you take hold on. Because faint suggestions are quite enough for the feeling of a courage.

[35:12]

They still won't be the art that's needed. But out of them grow, almost with amazing swiftness, just as in evolution, the faintest shifts in a species, out of that will grow sudden possibilities. And this is the perspective I have about tradition. So in the tradition, what do we talk about when we talk about great? In our English language tradition, I think, in poetry, Shakespeare, really all alone in my mind. That's because within that, there's such a variety that there seems to me, I do not feel that it's unique that I find me most there, because I turn poet after poet after poet who finds it, and yet he won't cover all occasions anyway, won't answer to all of them. And that's quite a fun enough, that's what defines great. Another one, certainly another symptom it seems to me,

[36:13]

is the variety of likeness, and almost the casualness of variety. But what is the other experience across time? Robert Browning was not going to be, he's the one who got me started, and where the excitement of what it might be to be a poet opened up. I could have a voice, and I realized in high school, I was looking for something that would be more me than I was, and I would still be doing that. As a matter of fact, what I was, the curious thing of self, of ego, neither of them pertinent to this. A voice that would be more medium, I think, wouldn't that? Nothing in between, nothing in between at all. That direct finally, and hints of it were right there in Robert Browning, in the fact that you could speak as a bishop ordering his tomb

[37:17]

and be more you than you were, and in no way were you this bishop. It's a dangerous point at this point, because the actor we think of as a person trying to find themselves. And in the 30s, first part of the century, there was a great deal of writing about, wasn't the artist looking for his identity or her identity? I'm not talking about this at all. There was too much Robert Duncan around all the time, although it's perfectly clear he did all sorts of thrashing, trying to arrive at a non-identity identity or whatever that would not get in his way. But, and yet, and very much, I think the question was, is it something more true? I still think immediate to some intuition about a potentiality, and this potentiality was not a potentiality of a person. Personal to me, very much, it's a potentiality of a poetry.

[38:22]

And so, right away, the poet, the one who was on his way already, her way already toward poetry, has a thing that's hard to explain to the others reading poetry, because they draw many things from poetry, but one thing they haven't drawn is the necessity yet of writing one. My experience of Robert Browning was not yet, and my being turned on by Robert Browning, was not yet at all the one of finding out much about what Robert Browning, what was there going on in the poems of Robert Browning. Not much about the technique. It was an immediate throught toward a potentiality. And in time, shaping and reshaping, and in my own experience, I go on all the time, pictures began to emerge of poets that I drew on. But before I want to go into the complex, in that one I would be like Pound,

[39:23]

or into the very firm picture of the tradition, I want to take a poet where it seems to be quite simple. I think I brought, Keats is carrying Shakespeare, used Shakespeare even to write letters, would write letters, all in quotes from Shakespeare, as the 19th century wrote letters, all in quotes from the Bible, or all in quotes from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a book which I read, I guess about the 10th or 11th, and have all my life read over and over again, although I do not write letters in quotes from Pilgrim's Progress. But it has that kind of hold, and one old man in the Moonstone, I think it is, says, you can find, they're faced with a murder and he goes to Pilgrim's Progress and opens it and draws a sword, points to a passage and that will answer the question, so you can find everything in there. That actually is essentially the way a poet also feels about form when we come to a letters page about the content. The first one is not a promise of content, it's a promise of a voice and an immediacy

[40:29]

and of a potentiality for speaking and so on. Yet, the priest has found a source and also a kindred soul as he carries Shakespeare. And when we find a poet, when we find Keats carrying Shakespeare, we know that something deeper, for instance, my relation to Shakespeare, which is deep, lies in Keats. It would be like, when we hear of Blank writing to Milton and addressing himself entirely to the spirit of Milton and finding Milton as a counter, an anti-Blank, the Blank is deeply involved with Milton. So we have instances of a poetry deeply involved with another poetry.

[41:33]

And my involvement with Shakespeare comes with certain key people, with Othello, persons of the form, with Othello, not as far as I know with Hamlet, but with Prospero, they are... Well, I would have thought of them as identifications, but out of Australian world I get something more important than that. They are eternal ones of the dream. You have dreamt the play, you've dreamt the poem, and the eternal ones return and become your ancestors, your adopted ancestors. So let me return here to picture that in literature you learn a literature of a country, and that is in the model, a literature of a culture. And that's a model, the most positive sense of that is that it's a culture in the sense of an agriculture working the soil, fertilizing it,

[42:37]

growing plants, and drawing upon its resources. And they become resources. But resources in a world of voices and persons and resources in poetry itself are also like your drawing upon the dream. And in the dreams that you have, they are yours personally, but the dreams across time, in them the ones that stay with you become also yours if you join the tribe that have had the dream. And perhaps it's an aspect of my Protestant origins that it also assumes a moralistic character that when I feel a poem is ill-made or its occasion has been sacrificed to something other than the occasion of the poem or the poetry, I actually take a moral take on it. And for the double bind, morality is one of the major places where a poem gets ill-made.

[43:40]

I mean, a poem addressed to a moral occasion is one of the first places where this moralist arises in wrath and then personalizes the whole situation so the poet gets to play. I hope in these explorations that we will be beyond outside and so forth of this framework. One of the great things we start with right away by starting out with the series called Beginning with Sardella. Starting out with Robert Browning and maybe we'll venture into some other Victorians. Chinese portrait today is not exotic at all. Ezra Pound first in Cathay and then Arthur Whaley by imitating Cathay and calling it Chinese and then Snyder by imitating Whaley and Pound and calling it Chinese or Japanese and so forth.

[44:41]

Whaley also went to Japanese and did the same trick. They did such a convincing job that that's not exotic to us. As a matter of fact, we're over-convinced that a set of an American and then an Englishman and then another American wrote all that stuff that probably the Chinese would be pretty disturbing to look at because we know very well what it sounds like in American. However, when we come to Victorian poetry that has been so closed off from our mind that the experience of reading it is exotic and it's quite a turn to realize that we have gorgeous poetry in the rhyme, regular metered poems that are in Rudyard Kipling that precede the stories in Rudyard Kipling's Peek-a-Pook's Hill Peek-a-Pook's Hill is a lovely series you can run on that one. And I still don't have a temperament for Tennyson because it was read devoutly by my family and I have various

[45:44]

as those who know my mother would be a fatheress that's a disturbed enough relation to a mother but my relation to the fact that my mother thought she was the maiden of shallot or something like that and that particular mother was never appreciated the terrible mother that the unions worry about is nothing compared with the lady of shallot mother who got minus, minus, minus points and makes it almost impossible to read Tennyson I see flocks of mother coming in the window that don't have the depth, the depth psychology part of the joke of depth psychology they don't know the terribleness of some of the inventions of that century and there are a few that shows me I must have the courage actually to read you I will tell you the reveal at this point that I had excerpted from Sardello I have little pencil marks they show me where to stop because if I were to go one phrase more I would be embarrassed my appreciation would falter

[46:47]

and they usually falter over the appearance of some of these ladies who also occur in Robert Browning I think we might as well encounter them since I've announced them and obviously seem to have subverted myself in the first five minutes as we approach the question so we're going to be launching off an adventure that involves both a sense of of how curious it is that poetry feels itself and addresses itself to being eternal and how sharply we find ourselves turned away from what poetry proposes as its eternal moments this is part of what happens luckily I don't know Chinese so I can take this venture out but I'm certain from what

[47:48]

poets do when they translate is that they move alright let me skip the Chinese because I was going to pay off Rex Roth wait a minute he hasn't done translations Snyder, Rex Roth and Back of that Pound and Whaley Whaley's not a poet but Whaley is the one who has good taste so we must remember in this regard one simple motto luckily our TV advertising has done it Star Kissed doesn't want tuna with good taste it wants tuna that tastes good and this quarrel in poetry is really quite a difficulty because every period has a very severe sense of good taste and tastes good Pound, raised in the 30's and

[48:48]

then being a pound addict by the time I was 16 or 17 masturbation was considerably had greater permission and it didn't have any permission in the 30's than the simple inversion of a poetic line which was much more disastrous so that the real gap in generations for my parents inversion of a line was ok isn't it lovely, inversion inversion in itself is a term we came into a period where every kind of inversion was possibly great except for inverting a poetic line and we'll meet in Robert Brown's Brownian syntax we'll meet things that can be done in syntax only if you do compound inversions just amazing inversions and you could not get the surface of the poem that does appear. One, for instance is not reproduced

[49:51]

in the poetry of our period that I've read. Another thing I must explain to anybody who's lingering who has the impression that sometimes I'm called erudite but it is would never qualify for teaching the poetry of the 20th century because my being in history not in literature or in poetry means that I've read only those poets that actually were drew me or were attractions and so in this first hour or in case that's what I want to start off and talk about but I will open with reading the passage of Pound's Cantos because it's from this that we get our starting out with Sordello. Doesn't mean we're going to keep in the Cantos uh and as always in these lectures I also will include what gossip I can say

[50:52]

age wisdom of moments those of you who love looking for books must tell you this if you're stuck in a town the size of St. Louis reading at a place and you discover when arriving there that you're reading to an English department not only that year but the ten years preceding and the fifty years following will never have anything to do with your poetry and that you've actually been invited simply because one freak in the library was head of it decided to buy your letters or so forth in a collection you learn first how this was Matthewson who went on to the Library of Congress but was at George Washington University and set up a policy in around 1960 and listed a list of some hundred poets that they would buy and so they became an open market to buy at any price and I was among those poets a hundred poets, not so select maybe it was fifty, let's make me select but it was still a lot of money

[51:54]

and so I was there with poets I would never read and so forth and more than the libraries don't read, they decide to buy you that's like we will buy all the car models coming out this year or something you end up in this place by that time I already knew if you're going to go to a place like St. Louis and be there for a week or something in the middle of a festival you hope somebody has asked you you go hoping believing that someone, maybe two people or something like that are concerned about the poetry but you also know by that time that if you don't write ahead of time you don't get to see anything else because they have a whole row of cocktail parties well I knew I wanted to see the zoo because they've got that great program on TV where the head of the St. Louis Zoo wild animals or whatever and so I said I wanted to see the zoo so I did get to see the zoo St. Louis is great

[52:55]

I've got enough of the St. Louis Zoo but one of the things on the line to pay back for the fact that I landed in a place where not one person knew a line of talking and they were looking even more than puzzled and I don't think I did a great job promoting what it was going to be I didn't feel I had a thousand new readers was I asked do you have a bookshop here any large bookshop and they took me to a huge dusty old bookshop and I look at it, it was hopeless I look at a couple of shelves, I look at some shelves they're not arranged in any order at all like poetry is not under poetry or anything, it was just arranged by when the books came into place 1960 we're at so I went through the whole thing and what I found I said I want to be here all day I did an insane thing I had to go volume by volume and this is an almost clean mint copy Lustre by Ezra Pound that's what I found

[53:57]

at the end of about six hours of going volume by volume it does stand out when you reach its shelf because you really had to look, I think it's sitting next to a cookbook and several books on geology and so forth, was sitting this well I paid $15 for it, it has first edition $15, that was even at 1960 that was not its price but it gives me then next door to having a copy of Poetry Magazine it was in this volume that this book came out in 1917 or 18 just before this one, this battered, this is the book to the poet's dismay when a young poet gets by there's a lot of kia popper amalami regardless of their pristine this is a middle-aged old poet very different, it even has a little

[54:57]

jacket on it already to keep it clean this is what you do when you hitchhike with a body this is what you do when you're so eager that you paste into the body but not too good, no this isn't pasted in, this one is because I had another disaster with another pound thing but this is the contemporary article on his being arrested this one I put in that way, which helps but I've got another volume where I pasted just a snotty article by Time Magazine into the volume like I wanted to remember forever to curse the people who wrote that kind of thing my signature helps a little but not the condition of the line but I was coming closer to home this is how the cantos began and we are starting out with Cedello with that as a key and so I'll read you this opening opening cantos and we start out with some some

[55:58]

poetry I better go to this volume it's the same text because I didn't cut the pages in this one why when I'm always reading it in this but it starts with a different title, three cantos of a poem of some length, that's just what the cantos were in Pound's mind remember at the end he just calls them cantos but he had at the point when he called them three cantos of a poem of some length there's a letter that he writes to his father, Pound was very close to his mother and father, these are important clues, they were close to him all the time, just as Henry James' parents were close to him and at the end of Rapallo, the two parents were living in Rapallo and the mother as I remember survives after Pound is arrested and brought back to St. Elizabeth they read and were eager readers of his poetry

[57:06]

puzzled supporters and his letters to them tell more about where his mind was he writes with great excitement to his father and says I have written three cantos of a poem of some length and I don't know what's going on in the poem and he realized that he had for the first time perhaps because we don't have this picture of other poems of great length if you picture Homer the great controversy about is there a Homer is that it's perfectly apparent that Homer is inhabiting a matter that had grown up over centuries and when he began when THE Homer began to tell the Iliad and the Odyssey he was not in an unknown poem of some length he knew what he had to tell there is no doubt about it and we may get into that because it's a place where there's a great disagreement between

[58:08]

poetry and the theorists of certain schools of folklore who pay attention to who pay attention to folklore and believe that these elements are what make it. Homer leaves his mark everywhere there's every evidence that there's a Homer that was the disaster that hit the epic material and we've got Herodotus Plato and Euripides all object that Homer lied or had told so wrong Herodotus insists that it's wrong as history Euripides insists that it's wrong as something and Plato gives away more on the show because he insists that it's wrong about the myth itself. But it happened to the myth, so poetry is not myth but it happened to the religion because there is a religion backer part of it. You begin to realize that the story of Helen in the Iliad is bound up with things that were learned in the mysteries about Helen

[59:08]

that no one could speak of but what the Helen was Helen existed very much like the co-existence of Jesus and Christos in the Christian religion both as an historical person in the minds of the Greek in a history they hardly could place we don't have a very easy time to place where Christ is in history because no divine person is fit in what is history and yet there is a suspicion rightly they must have their historical occasion it's nice here because we can't locate Homer in history and can't find his historical occasion but the evidence of the 5th century and 6th century Greeks that they felt Homer had lied mean that he had made up something in the place of the sacred history when a poet happens to sacred history the whole

[60:10]

thing changes because creative enters and it becomes original all over again it re-originates itself and the great fear in religions and the great fear in myth in telling your story of what happened is that a creative person may arrive and then they tell the story long and part of what I want to talk about in this hour is this has something to do with tradition keeping alive a spiritual identity through time and the advent of the creative within it which the smallest creation by the way gets it wrong it's our first sensation about a poem is that they're likely to get wrong the material or they tell it wrong did it really happen that way one of the other danger signs is the poet the would be poet will say but I really felt

[61:10]

that and the poem will somehow not have ever created it we're robbed of our occasion when we really felt something and consequently don't create it this is part of what I will be returning to again and again about the creative we are going to be dealing with creative it is very different indeed from the true the creative world has it's own sense of a truth and will be offensive to almost any other sense of the truth that would arrive at well let's go back to our town and that he launches himself in that letter to the father and my sense from it but my sense right away of the excitement in the canvas himself when I began certainly not understanding

[62:12]

anything if I'd only known then that Mr. Brown hadn't understood what the word I might have felt a little more reassured but I didn't actually feel that I was getting them wrong when I didn't understand what they were about at all I was riding in excitement and nothing had appeared to me before in poetry that seemed such an open experience to ride in excitement now at the time that I looked at the cantos first and I read the opening line that the cantos have when Pound tackles the question again and rearranges them in the rise of the final one and then went down to the ship set keeled the breakers forth on the godly sea and we set up mast and sail on that sport ship boar sheep abort her and our bodies also heavy with weeping those lines when I read them first standing in a bookshop looking at them seemed overwhelming I could not bear there's nothing

[63:12]

it was not something I didn't know but I couldn't bear the impact of it I can remember it only too well a physical pain of apprehension something at that age I was I had just arrived at college I had been there for one term so I must have been already then 18 something like that a blue stocking I appreciate blue stockings all my life a lady blue stocking whose poem I had been the only freshman editor on the Occident and I found I was the only one voting for a poem and all the rest were no, no, no so I asked if I could return the poem and met one Louise Antoinette Krauss who looked exactly like a Dresden doll and was the most

[64:14]

I had not met a more severe blue stocking since and trait overwhelmed underwhelmed I'm not sure what was the mood reproved reproved for my possible admiration I was immediately initiated to the in about two days to the existence of transition massively to the work of Gertrude Stein because Louise Antoinette Krauss' male adjunct concubine his entirely her folly was doing his I keep thinking thinking

[65:14]

as a problems women propose today which is those of equality in the 30s a Louise Antoinette Krauss doesn't really come to the human dimension at all because so she consequently never became a writer because she wouldn't have dreamt that somebody would equality equality if he wasn't even a sex object he was an object I mean an abstinent object sort of selected well I was plunged into the existence of Stein because he Robert Haass wrote the first thesis on Gertrude Stein which was on Whitehead and Gertrude Stein philosophy done at the University of California at the end of the period when I knew him alright let me get back to the quote they're descending from the I house down the hill with a Duncan traipsing along and Robert Haass

[66:15]

said should he read Eliot and Louise Antoinette I think he had a voice no he's much too lurid already I continue to be more and more lurid he should read Pound I wasn't even sure I heard the name right and I staggered away took me two weeks to have the courage to go find out what this would be and opened that volume and read those lines so in that same period I must say they didn't put Virginia Woolf I had already started to read in high school but the waves had something like that upsetting quality for me that if I felt very very strong I could read it it wasn't a matter of it being heavy it was a matter of it being so exact and to me carved forever

[67:16]

in the lines that it even opened with or proposed that it became painful and those were the lines that was the quality of those lines and still for me today that he arrives at that's not where he started and so let's go to the first opening and why we start out with Sordello hang it all there can be but one Sordello but say I want to say I take your whole bag of tricks let in your quirks and tweaks and say the things in art form your Sordello and that the modern world needs such a rag bag to stuff all its thought in say that I dump my catch shiny and silvery as fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles I stand before the booth the speech but the truth is inside this discourse this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom

[68:18]

give up the intaglio method tower by tower red brown the rounded bases and the plan follows the builder's whim both cares slim gray leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte Mohammed windows for the Alcazar has such a garden split by a tame small screen the moat is ten yards wide the inner courtyard half a swim with mire trunk hose there are not the rough men swarm out in robes that are half Roman half like the nave of hearts and I discern your story pericardinal was half forerunner of Dante Arnaud's the trick of the unfinished address and half your dates are out you mix your eras for that great font Sordello sat beside tis an immortal passage but the font is some two centuries outside the picture and no matter ghosts move about me patched with history

[69:18]

you had your business to set out so much thought with so much emotion and call the lot Sordello worthy evasion the setting figures up and breathing life upon them as it a place in music and your appear Verona I walk the airy street see the small cobbles flare with poppy spoil tis your great day the corpus domini and all my chosen peninsular village has spread this scarlet blaze with its upon its lane but before I was up with poppy flowers mid June and up and out to the half ruined chapel not the old place at the height of the rocks but that splayed barn like church the renaissance had never quite got into trim again as well begin here here began Catullus home to sweet rest and to the waves deep laughter the laugh they wait amid the border rushes this is our home the trees are full of laughter and the storms laugh loud breaking the ribbon waves on square shale

[70:20]

rocks and here the sunlight glimpses on the shaking waters and the rain comes forth with delicate tread walking for Isola Garda low soleil profile it is the sun rains and a spatter of fire darts in the Lydian ripples and the face and place is full of spirits not the mores not dark and wet shadow wet ghost but ancient living wood white smooth as the inner bark and firm of aspect and all a gleam of color not a gleam but colored like the late and olive leaves clothed like the poppies wearing golden wreaths light on the air are the Etruscan gods the air is solid sunlight apricots sunbed we dwell here we in England now for Sirmeo served my whim better than a solo yours an unseen your palisette my stone seat was the Dogon's

[71:21]

vulgarist curve and there were not those girls there was one flair one face was all I ever saw but it was real and I can no more say what shape it was but she was young too young true it was Venice and at Florians under the North Arcade I had seen other faces and had my rolls for breakfast drifted at night and seen the lift gilt frost beams glare from the Morrocini and for what it's worth I have my background and you had your background watched the soul Sordello's soul flare up and lap up life and leap to the Imperium worked out the form meditative semi dramatic semi epic story and what's left free Don Chaucer free Boccaccio not Arnaud not Auxerre gods float in the azure air bright gods in Tuscan back before dew was shed it is a world like Pouvy's never so pale

[72:23]

my friend is the first light not half-light and old girls in the mealets have all the wood our olive sirio lies in its burnished mirror and the mounts Balde and Riva are alive with song and all the leaves are full of voices non ne fude it is not gone that Tassio is right we have that world about us and the clouds bow over the lake and there are folk upon them going their windy ways moving by Riva by the western shore far at Lunato and the water is full of silvery white swimmers the silvery water glazes the upturned nipple when Atlas sat down with his astrolabe he brother to Prometheus witnesses we let Ficino start our progress say it was Moses birth year exult in Chang in squatness the sea monster bulge in the squarish bronzes dove out with

[73:23]

blue ascaris Egypt green veins in the turquoise or grey gradual steps lead up into beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars temple of teak wood and the gilt brown arches triple in tier banners woven by wall fine screens depicted sea waves curled high small boats with gods upon them bright flame above the river Quannon floating a boat that's but one lotus petal with some proud four square genius leading along one hand upraised for gladness saying to she his friend the mighty goddess sing hymns ye reeds and all ye roots and herons and swans be glad ye gardens of the nymphs put forth your flower what have I of this life for even of Guido a pleasant lie that I knew or San Michele believes the tomb

[74:23]

he left was Giulia Lata do not even know which sword he's whipping in this sweet charge I have but smelt this life a whiff of it the box of scented wood recalls cathedral shall I claim infuse my own fantasticon or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me contains the actual sun infuse the thing I see with actual gods behind them are they gods behind me worlds we have how many worlds we have if Botticelli brings her ashore on that great cockle shell is Venus Simonetta and spring and Oedipus fill all the air with their clear outline blossoms world enough behold I say she comes apparelled like the spring and graces her subjects Pericles such worlds enough we have have brave decors and from these light we guess a soul for man and building full of airy populations panting in Faustus

[75:24]

Mantegna's sterner line and the new world about us barred lights great flares and right to paint not music O Casella In the final framework of the cantos the sordello is not in the opening canto it appears in canto two at the beginning hang it all Robert Browning there can be but one sordello but sordello and my sordello sordello so shoe churned in the sea seal sports in the spray circles of cliff wash sleek head daughter of Lear eyes of Picasso under black fur hood lies daughter of ocean and we have to go on quite a bit further before we come to another thing that is

[76:25]

I have been searching pound essays in criticism and descriptions and they don't carry it this far it is sordello in in Browning's sordello we will find it when we start going into sordello who is sitting on the palace steps yet it is read all the way through because pound went to Venice because it is sordello's Venice he went to I sat on the dogana steps for the gondolas cost too much that year and there were not those girls there was one face and the butch and thoric twenty yards off howling stretty and the lip crossed beams that year in the Morosini erased or gone is the step that is perfectly clear in these other ones that it is Robert Browning and Robert who is sitting on the steps the magical steps in Venice where actually sordello is also sitting and so that by the time pound going

[77:27]

to Venice going to the city of Robert Browning and sordello will be sitting in once seated on the steps of looking at the canal is in a magic place where we cross time and all three come together and there are there is a hint of a process like that in the final flows but it also is picking up a sound that is out of the Robert Browning and Robert Browning in the sordello when we come to it will be Shelly's ghost that appears and has to be told to to leave the poem so that we get to sordello and more than that Robert Browning rightly feels that if Shelly were there at all he, Robert Browning wouldn't be able to write he hasn't got Shelly's immediate melodic soul matter of fact I am not sure how many poets have that and it is overwhelming

[78:29]

to poets when you have a gift like remember gifts are a real thing to have and when they come to poetry they come to poetry as a whole so they can be re-inhabited in a way but they also haunt and Browning then says likewise Shelly doesn't mention Shelly's name but go back what occurs in the middle of the end of the first canto I mean right in the midst of the what Browning puts in his first canto is a real hint and it's part of what is that episode of what I'm really at when I talk about the transition our ideas of tradition and our ideas of also have to do with the difficulty that I have in the poet thinking about archetypes because we're not dealing with psychology we're dealing with the creative world inhabited by whose creations are ultimately

[79:30]

real when you meet them in poems you experience them as experiences and consequently I've met them in the creative world they're not the unconscious Spicer rightly said of the elements it could be called the unconscious but what does it make any difference if I say they were written by Martians if they're written outside what you meet in the world of the poet of the poem then you have told me nothing when you say unconscious and I told you nothing when I say Martians you can't contradict me because they must come totally outside you can't like claim you're unconscious as yours anymore than or in any other way that you like claim to the group of Martians the difficulty here because Spicer wanted for sure for them to be something worse than Martians demons outside the idea of creation but what we begin the cantos with when Kant shakes him and sees in a funny way a lead or takes the lead is

[80:30]

that episode where Ulysses goes down and pours blood into the and calls in order to call up and learn what his fateful odyssey is to be where he is to go and which the ordeal that he's to undergo part of what was on Pound's mind too at this point when he was shaping this step and as it's called up then the first one coming is Elpenor and I'll read from the Elpenor on and give you a clue about what it is Pound tells us that when he quarreled with Yates he quarreled with Yates over the subject of seances and the subject of ghosts coming up in seances and it was ill tempered

[81:34]

Pound was outraged at the idea of Yates going over and over again to mediums and getting the voice of the dead what Yates knew very well as well as Pound is that the substance of what he ever got from the dead was very indeed and Yates' major breakthroughs were like Pound's it is in Shelley that Blake found his wandering that Blake, that Yates found his wandering Jew who was one of the most central informants to Yates throughout informed what it was that's why his soul was wandering throughout time it was based on that an apparition in Shelley not something at a seance but it isn't only Pound who was outraged with Blake going to seance tables, I think we can remember that Robert Browning was outraged about Elizabeth Barrett Browning going to seance tables

[82:35]

and even in high school at the very beginning, Robert Browning was my beginning enthusiasm for poetry, for the initiation of what it could be, and I came from a family who sat at seance tables getting data I never heard of we didn't get to see we didn't get to see what they got on the seance tables but a couple of times I ever heard I heard a medium going, it was not anything as thrilling as it was for the people who were in the poetry classes I, in the very beginning when I learned that Robert Browning was outraged by going to a seance table, I thought, no wonder Robert Browning among all poets perhaps we can let's question Shakespeare because Shakespeare seems to be a multitude of people seems to be everybody but Shakespeare but Robert Browning

[83:38]

inhabited ghosts I mean his dramatic monologues beat any seance table you ever saw in your life and for anybody who could sit down and in the depth of a poem get ten times as much as anyone ever, verifiably bring around any stupendous account of a transcribed, miles of seances transcribed and none of them come up come up to what Robert Browning would get a poem so tremendously moving into another period into another person we call it recreating we also call it recreation when we're playing cards or when we play tennis or we have a whole series of things we do in life we call recreation and the pun what is it, the anagram of meaning the homonym between recreating and recreating and recreation has hidden in it I guess the idea of recreation is we're recreating our body

[84:39]

in some sense by letting it really enter into this play and we have the double meaning for play they're playing but the play is going on and once the play is the thing there for sure we will see Cleopatra, there for sure we will so see Macbeth will so see Macbeth that never in history or never by resurrecting or digging up a tomb or anything will ever become, can it possibly become more real and in one stupendous example that is right at hand the one of Richard III Shakespeare will so create him and more than that hide a cunning little joke in the recreation the tutors were falsifying history almost exactly as history was falsified in the period of Stalin Russian history of the revolution and Shakespeare was thoroughly cooperative

[85:41]

but in a rather cunning and strange way because while a great saint St. Thomas More had been asked to do a life of Richard III and had thoroughly done a large enormous lie written what the tutors wanted Shakespeare just did one added thing he put a hump on Richard III's back something everybody knew had not been on Richard III's back you couldn't find a portrait with a hump on it he made it a major thing and yet he made that Richard III so convincingly Richard III that he outdid the tutors and everybody else he showed that creative story is more powerful anywhere than our historical perspective there is a wonderful detective novel by Josephine Tay that is

[86:41]

the detective landing in a hospital does a detective job on Richard III and the murder of the little princes penetrates back to the Shakespeare but okay but then you have mere history and it's not myth, we're not talking about myth or even legend when we're talking about the creation so that Richard III is both immortal and eternal which tell us is ahistorical more powerful in history must be one of the terms for it and consequently in an area very disturbing in this period in Elsinore we find only too soon as Pound because Pound's identification with Odysseus with Ulysses becomes quite clear once he's at Pisa once he's arrested but it isn't even the arrest

[87:41]

there's shots through and what makes the Pisa encounter extraordinary is that Pound comes up against ah his hubris in order to come up against it he had to commit a hubris that was unbelievable totally unbelievable in the 30s as you advance the depths of that hubris having some enthusiasm for Mussolini is not a major hubris I do not want to reflect on some of the cats I've voted for I have to approve me at a point when I was so scared that a Nixon might get in that I signed a document in which I anticipated that one Johnson was going to mean well by all us artists and and I'd love to think he merely cheated this but if you think about it

[88:44]

could it be more appalling voting for the guy who invades Abyssinia of course after the fact that's true I mean but my blow up at the thought of Johnson had ... ... ...

[88:58]

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