/lit/ - Literature

2023... I am forgotten

>>19876329
He looked like a guy who was about 0.8 seconds away from sticking a knife in your ribs and demanding your wallet, I love it

How difficult is it to get into this guy?
I'm looking to get the Library of America collection which afaik contains all his poetry except those in the Cantos, are these difficult to read and understand? Is his style of poetry an acquired taste to appreciate?
I don't know any language other than English but I'm trying to learn Latin atm and I remember his poetry containing quite a lot of non English text, I've also not read much classical literature besides parts of the bible and the Greeks so i'll probably miss the references

>"Philosophy" went out in the fifteen hundreds, in the sense that after Leibniz the thought of people who labelled themselves philosophers no longer led or enlightened the rest of the thinkers. "Abstract thought" or "general thought" or philosophic thought after that time was ancillary to the work of material scientists.

>>18966426
Ezra Pound

>>18820728
>London stank of decay back before 1914 and I have recorded the feel of it in a poem here and there. The live man in a modern city feels this sort of thing or perceives it as the savage perceives in the forest. I don’t know how many men keep alive in modern civilization but when one has the frankness to compare notes one finds that the intuition is confirmed just as neatly or almost as neatly as if the other man saw a shop sign.

>Thus London going mouldy back in say 1912 or 1911. After the War death was all over it.

>Italy was, on the other hand, full of bounce. I said all of this to a Lombard writer. I said: London is dead, Paris is tired, but here the place is alive. What they don’t know is plenty, but there is some sort of animal life here. If you put an idea into these people they would DO something.

>The Lombard writer said yes ... and looked across the hotel lobby; finally he said: “And you know it is terrible to be surrounded by all this energy and ... and ... not to have an idea to put into it.”

>Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of general Grant but the condition of their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn’t the moral force to translate knowledge into action I don’t believe it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.

>And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.

>I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 500 men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.

>Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power. The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order. Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.

>>17866690
>JEFFERSON didn’t believe any nation had the right to contract debts that it couldn’t pay off with reasonable effort within nineteen years.

>“ The best place for keeping money is in the pockets of the people.”

>We have had the century of the “benefits of concentration of capital” (and the malefits).

>Paper money in the popular pocket would not breed stagnation and it would not stay there for the reasons of oriental hoarding. The popolano would want to show it was there. Its distribution would mean greater mobility of goods.

>The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists. The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.

>As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government. In other countries they excuse inexplicable perfidies by saying “These men are personally honest.” I am now quoting an admiral : “All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personally honest.” The implication being that they play the super-crooks’ game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.

>A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling. It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective. Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat’s-paws.

>The fascist hate of demi-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that, in many cases, they don’t and have not.

>I. When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the people who need it.
>II. It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.
>(This is akin to the Confucian idea that you achieve the good of the world by FIRST achieving good government IN your own country.)
>III. When potential production (possible production) of anything is sufficient to meet everyone’s needs it is the business of the government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.
>Note that in America when there was plenty and more than plenty of land, our government handed it out despite Quincy Adams’s protests.

>This third idea becomes an “idea statale” when I say “it is the business of the government.” But note that Mussolini is NOT a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen’s nose and monkey with the individual’s diet. IF, when and whenever the individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state WANTS the industry and the individual to DO it, and it is only in case of sheer idiocy, incapacity or simple greed and dog-in-the-mangerness that the state intervenes to protect the unorganized PEOPLE; public; you me and the other fellow.

>The rest is political “machinery,” bureaucracy, flummydiddle. Jefferson, Mussolini, Lenin, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get rid of it: “All this is political machinery, want to get rid of it,” as Stef reported Lenin’s opinion in 1918.

>Gents who make guns like to sell ’em; such is the present state of the world, in the bourgeois demoliberal anti-Marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system. And as the Stampa correspondent has indicated, the selling of guns and powder differs from ALL other industries in that the more you sell the greater the demand for the product. The more goes to consumer A the greater the demand of the other consumers. Hence the love, the loving and tender love of banks for munition works.