‘The Logical Conclusion’

As Ian Hamilton writes in Against Oblivion (2002), “everyone who thinks at all about modern poetry sooner or later has to take a view of Ezra Pound” – the American-born poet who moved to London in 1908 to become one of the chief architects of modernism, and whose energy and self-assurance “brought Georgianism to its knees”. Writing in 1919, Pound described the state of literary criticism in England when he arrived as “deader than mutton”, its practitioners “much more anxious to look tidy and emit the seven or eight ligneous bleats required on all polite occasions than to discover international standards and stimulate”. At the heart of Pound’s famously eclectic reading was the search for “sound criteria”, a personal canon – much of which he translated from Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, Medieval Italian, eighth-century Chinese – from which the principles of good writing could be learnt. It was the strength of this commitment that made him so impatient of modern poets on both sides of the Atlantic. To Harriet Monroe, founder editor of the American journal Poetry, he wrote, “whom do you know who takes the Art of poetry seriously? As seriously that is as a painter takes painting … who will stand for a level of criticism even when it throws out most of their own work?”

In “The Logical Conclusion”, published in the TLS in 1977 and then in Ezra Pound: Collected early poems (1977), Pound could well be attacking the philological approach to literary criticism – the reason he left university without taking a degree. But what drives this scathing critique is his respect for “all the good poems” that scholarship buries. And it is less a counsel of despair, perhaps, than a warning: “Baalam’s ass” alludes to the Old Testament story of Balaam, whose donkey could see what its owner couldn’t – that the angel of the Lord was standing in their way to warn him not to persist in a foolish error.

The Logical Conclusion

When earth’s last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme,
When truth shall “baaa” on the hill crests
And no-one shall dare to dream;

When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship’s zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam’s ass shall inquire
The price of imported oats;

Then no-one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special ass-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the ass shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.

Against the “germanic” system of graduate
study and insane specialization in the Inanities.

EZRA POUND (1977)

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