POLITICS AND THE LUMINOUS DETAIL

At about the time that Eliot was delivering his Extension lectures and Yeats was first making contact with the hidden dictators of A Vision, Ezra Pound was writing a series of articles entitled “Provincialism the Enemy.” The three projects seem uncannily synchronized, as if Yeats's occult interlocuters were in fact in general contact with the intelligentsia of Europe. Eliot's concern was the contradictory status of modern man, suspended between a real subjection to facts and an idealistic escape from them. In their own way, the spirits were saying the same thing to Yeats, who noted down their prediction of an imminent break when the conflict of primary and antithetical reaches its natural extreme. For Pound, this extreme already existed in the intellectual method he called Kultur, which subjects its students to a rain of atomized facts and to overwhelming abstract generalizations. Such a synchronization might seem even more occult if extended to include Lukács, who described, a year or two later, the peculiar relationship of total abstraction and isolated facts characteristic of capitalism.

At the very least, these parallels suggest a common European dissatisfaction, a sense of loneliness and dislocation matched by an equally intense feeling of oppression and conformity. Lukács's answer was dialectics, a method that would produce a concrete totality linking empirical fact and ideal, concrete particular and generalization, individual and community. In less overtly dogmatic ways, the three poets attempted something similar, though dialectic sometimes looked a lot like mere contradiction. Eliot praised the Action Franchise in 1916 for favoring centralization; thirty years later he still admired this group, but this time because it stood for decentralization.