No Bob Dylan Without Ezra Pound
In 1975, Allen Ginsberg , Beat poet and elder statesman of what had recently been christened the counterculture, gave a lecture on modern poetry to students at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, Colorado. âI would venture to sayâ, Ginsberg told his audience, âthat there would have been no Bob Dylan without Ezra Poundâ (Staff 2017). On the face of it, it was an unlikely and provocative connection for Ginsberg to have made. In style and politics, Pound represented much of what the Beat Generation and its literary descendants purported to stand against. His were the aesthetics of âconcreteâ precision not freeform expression, of modernising through engagement with tradition rather than the radical renunciation promoted by the Beats. Moreover, Poundâs early twentieth-century movementâborn in London in the run-up to First World War and including T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the philosopher-poet T.E. Hulmeâwas by 1975 synonymous with a right-wing politics entirely contrary to the social and political ideologies Ginsbergâand certainly Bob Dylanâadhered to.
From Eliotâs conservative Anglo-Catholicism to Hulmeâs, Lewisâ and Poundâs flirtations with fascism, these so-called Men of 1914 practised a public politics that in the post-Second World War West marked them out as relics of the dark and not-so-distant past.1 Add to this that Ginsberg and Dylan were both Jewish, that Pound, Eliot and Lewis had tolerated and at points promoted anti-Semitism, and that Pound had been exposed very publically for siding with Mussolini during the war, and the genealogy sounds even less tenable. Crowds like the one Ginsberg addressed at Naropa were used to hearing Walt Whitman , Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake cited as Romantic, democratic influences on the Beat movement, and were no doubt puzzled by his claim of kinship with a poet whose public image screamed elitist obscurantism and fascist anti-Semitism.
And yet that statement of affinity is critical to a proper understanding not only of Ginsberg as poet but about the post-Second World War movement he came to signify. Apart from Poundâs anomalous but very real poetic influence on late twentieth-century American letters, it speaks to a connection where most see a rupture between early century European modernism and the youth rebellion that emerged across the United States after 1945. This book is an attempt to understand that connection, to understand the Beat Generation and the literary counterculture it spawned as products rather than straightforward reactions against the philosophy and politics of writers like Pound, Eliot and Lewisâwriters whose own rebellions were centred on the tiredness of standard humanist and Romantic traditions. In the popular and academic imagination, those traditions are exactly what Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs aimed to restore. There was, the story goes, a struggle towards a better understanding of self through literature with the purpose of liberating the individual from societal and psychological oppression; in short, the kind of transcendence through interior contemplation that Romantic poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman had exulted in the nineteenth century.
It would of course be absurd to deny the Beat Generationâs debt to that American Transcendentalist tradition and to present them as opposed to humanism per se. Their work is permeated by a longing for progress, both for the individual and for the collective. Ginsberg in particular spent most of his career railing publically against social injustice and trying to guide young people towards the construction of a harmonious social and political world. By 1966, as Theodore Roszak points out, he had âcommitted himself totally to the life of prophecy ⊠allowed his entire existence to be transformed by the visionary powers with which he conjures and has offered it as an example to his generationâ (Roszak, p. 128). Although not engaged publically in politics, Kerouac and Burroughs both envisioned the human race as brimming with potential but limited by misconceived mechanisms of control. However, much of what these writers produced in the 1950s and 1960s also carried with it a paradoxical uncertainty about whether mankind truly was perfectible, an uncertainty that can be traced back to a period in Anglo-Americanâand Europeanâliterary history when philosophical and political humanism had continually been called into question.
Anti-humanism/Anti-Romanticism
Before going further, it is important to define exactly what I mean by âhumanismâ, âanti-humanismâ and indeed âthe countercultureâ. The Oxford English Dictionary categorises humanism in two connected but distinct ways: first as âa rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural mattersâ and secondly, âa Renaissance cultural movement which turned away from medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thoughtâ (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). The first, more familiar definition refers to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a sea change in philosophical thought represented most enduringly by Immanuel Kant and involving the attempt to understand human existence as determined by humans themselves rather than deific forces. The second historical-cultural definition refers to a shift in religious study, beginning in the late fourteenth century and involving the attempt to improve society by broadening the scope of Christian thought to include forgotten Latin and Ancient Greek texts, both Christian and Pagan.
As Renaissance historian John Hale points out, though the roots of Enlightenment humanism lie firmly in the Renaissance, this earlier form is best kept âfree from any hint of either âhumanitarianismâ or âhumanismâ in its modern sense of rational, non-religious approach to lifeâ since âits students in the main wished to supplement, not contradict [Christian doctrine], through their patient excavation of the sources of ancient God-inspired wisdomâ (Hale 1981, p. 171). Iâll come to pose questions related to Renaissance humanismâparticularly around the quasi-religious positions taken up by many of the Beat writersâbut the focus of this book is the ebb and flow in twentieth-century letters of a faith in the human potential for progressâand for arriving eventually at a point of perfectionâthat arose out of the Enlightenmentâs usurpation of religion.
This is what the philosopher John Gray, in his 2002 book Straw Dogs, calls the âupshot of [Arthur] Schopenhauerâs criticism of Kantâ, that in his aim âto replace traditional religion by faith in humanityâ, Kant arrived âonly [at] a secular version of Christianityâs central mistakeâânamely, the belief that man could transcend his animal limits and be redeemed (Gray 2002, p. 41). While to different degrees sympathetic to religion, Pound, Lewis, T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot are each representative of a turn among early twentieth-century experimental writers against that âfaith in humanityâ, and in particular against its manifestation in what they saw as corruptive eighteenth-century literary Romanticism. This is an aspect of the âanti-humanismâ my title refers to, a belief that âattaching prime importance to human ⊠mattersâ had served to produce an ersatz and inadequate replacement for fundamental moral and aesthetic values, a formâas Hulme put itâof âspiltâ classicism and religion (Hulme 1994, p. 62).
The equation of literary Romanticism with humanism is complicated by the fact that Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge in England and Emerson and Whitman in America were reacting against the ârationalist outlookâ that underpinned the Enlightenment. They were motivated, as Hulme suggests, by a religious desire to reinstate faith in intuition and beauty in an age dominated by reason. If that means the Romantics can themselves be defined as âanti-humanistâ, my parameters are dictated by a twentieth-century definition of humanism that emphasises not rationalism per se but the negation of humanityâs imperfect nature. Attacking the Romantic and âhumanist attitudeâ together in 1911, Hulme wrote:
When a sense of the reality of ⊠absolute values is lacking, you get a refusal to believe any longer in the radical imperfection of either Man or Nature. This develops logically into the belief that life is the source and measure of all values, and that man is fundamentally good. Instead, then, of/ Man (radically imperfect) ⊠apprehending ⊠Perfection, â/ you get the second term (now entirely misunderstood) illegitimately introduced inside the first [ellipses and brackets Hulmeâs own]. This leads to a complete change in all values. The problem of evil disappears, the conception of sin loses all meaning. (1994, p. 444)
This is the crux of the anti-humanist position I am exploring, a position of violent reaction against the perceived vanity in believing that people are fundamentally good. It was a reaction that had its roots in Schopenhauerâs and Frederick Nietzscheâs nineteenth-century attacks on the Enlightenment but reached an apex in Anglo-American literary thought as First World War approached. Within such a paradigm, the Beatsâ quest for individual Enlightenment apparently repeatsâin the mid-twentieth centuryâthe mistakes of the Romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As weâll see, Hulme and the other âMen of 1914â differed in their political beliefs and affiliations. They also disagreed philosophically about the power of political and social ideology to effect changeâEzra Poundâs faith in the possibility of a new economic and political order rendering him in many ways humanistic as opposed to Hulme and T.S. Eliot, who sought solace from the political and social in the absolute authority of religion. But they agreed wholeheartedly that a Romantic bastardisation of absolute ethical and aesthetic truths had obfuscated the Western value scale.
What I suggest is that the Beat inheritors of the Romantic tradition ha...