16 ene 2011

Seances and Confucianism

Do we have to take Yeats séances and Pound's Confucianism at the same level of seriousness? To me they are both symptoms of modernist weirdness, eccentricity.

3 comentarios:

Thomas dijo...

I take Pound's confucianism pretty seriously. In fact, Pound changed my thinking about Eastern philosophy; it was a good corrective to an easy Taoist pose I developed as an undergraduate.

I've never really thought seriously about the occult, however, and don't think an immersion in Yeats's poetry (or prose) would change that. But I guess that begs the question you are asking.

I'm not sure how one could take Pound seriously if one found it necessary to dismiss his Confucianism as mere "weirdness". Then again, I've been starting to think similar things about his fascism, which is a someone disturbing experience.

Zed dijo...

It's not entirely clear how seriously Yeats took his own occultism, is it? It's been a while since I read the Roy Foster biography but Foster seemed to suggest that Yeats was almost agnostic about the whole thing. Of course one has to know something about the system to understand the later poems.

Jordan dijo...

Hey wait! the Confucianism is just about the only aspect of Pound's intellect (aside from versification and satire) I'm comfortable with.