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1 - Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2023

Suzanne Hobson
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Andrew Radford
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

[W]ith the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction to-day […] tend to become less and less real. […] If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an élite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. This is exactly what we find of the society which Mr. Pound puts in Hell, in his Draft of XXX Cantos. […] If you do not distinguish between individual responsibility and circumstances in Hell, between essential Evil and social accidents, then the Heaven (if any) implied will be equally trivial and accidental. Mr. Pound’s Hell, for all its horrors, is a perfectly comfortable one for the modern mind to contemplate, and disturbing to no one’s complacency: it is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends.

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 1934

We want an European religion. Christianity is verminous with semitic infections. What we really believe is the pre-Christian element which Christianity has not stamped out. The only Christian festivals having any vitality are welded to sun festivals, the spring solstice, the Corpus and St. John’s eve, registering the turn of the sun, the crying of ‘Ligo’ in Lithuania, the people rushing down into the sea in Rapallo on Easter morning, the gardens of Adonis carried to Church on the Thursday.

Ezra Pound, ‘Statues of Gods’, 1939

MODERNISTS ARGUED FIERCELY over the role of Christianity within the development of Western culture and civilisation. How was the Christian past to be understood, whether positively or negatively? What contemporary role might Christianity play in confronting the felt crisis of a ‘decadent’ modernity? Did it hold the answer to this crisis – or did it rather impede the necessary remaking of culture, politics, humanity itself? As I pointed out in Modernism and Christianity, the economic, social and political crises of the 1930s exacerbated these questions, effectively placing ‘a whole civilisation on trial’.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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