In 1967, poet and McGill English prof Louis Dudek proposed bringing Ezra Pound to the World Poetry Conference, planned as part of Expo. The proposal was unanimously approved by the organizing committee, which was chaired by Jean-Guy Sylvestre (poet and director of the National Library of Canada) and included Dudek, Jean Guy Pilon (lawyer-poet), George Whalley (prof, translator, critic and historian) and others. Dudek extended the invitation — in 1949, as a grad student at Columbia, he visited Pound at St. Elizabeths insane asylum, where the courts had incarcerated him after accepting a plea of insanity during his trial for treason. Dudek tried to help Pound by finding books for him and getting him released, and was still corresponding with him. Pound, released in 1958 primarily through the efforts of poets Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish, both of whom had political connections, and back to living in Italy, 82 years old and by near-universal consensus the greatest living poet in English, agreed to come. Just before he was to arrive, his companion Olga Rudge took sick and Pound cancelled.

 

Ezra Pound

Pound’s appearance at Expo has got to be one of the great non-events in Canadian history. It would be an ideal subject for a speculative novel that would feature high-level politicians like Pearson, Diefenbaker and Trudeau, Quebec neo-Nazis and fans of Lionel Groulx, and a host of authors. Pound was still notorious for his fascism and anti-Semitism. He’d been indicted for treason in 1943, around the time that Mussolini was forced to resign, the fascist party was outlawed, and Italy, half occupied by the Allies, left the war. Ignoring the indictment, of which he’d heard on BBC radio, Pound went on propagandizing for the Germans, vilifying Jews, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and the Allied war effort, advocating that allied forces stop fighting. Pound’s rationale for continuing the broadcasts was that “if a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.” Pound’s broadcasts were heard by Allied soldiers and sailors involved in the landings and battles in North Africa in April-May 1943. Some of the speeches were printed and circulated during the war by Olga Rudge, also a fascist.

 

Pound was not a spokesman for Mussolini and the fascist party. In fact, fascist officials were for a time so confused by his broadcasts that they suspected Pound was sending coded information to the Allies. He was free to say what he wanted, and expressed himself extensively on the Constitution of the United States and on art and poetry. He read from his ongoing epic poem, the Cantos (1917-). He explained Social Credit as the ideal economic system. He praised fascism: “Every human being who is not a hopeless, idiotic worm should realize that fascism is superior in every way to Russian Jewocracy and that capitalism stinks.” As Pound explained it, Jewish bankers and industrialists were behind social evils through all history: “The kike . . . in London . . . got the Red Indians to murder the American settlers, has herded the Slavs, Mogols, and the Tartars openly against Germany and secretly against all that is decent in America.” He advocated that the top Jews should be killed or incarcerated: “Don’t start a pogrom . . . that is, an old-style killing of small Jews . . . start a pogrom up at the top. But on the whole legal measures are preferable. The 60 kikes who started the war might be sent to St. Helena.”

 

After his incarceration in St. Elizabeths, there were suspicions, more and more obviously justifiable as the years passed and Pound accumulated attention and awards for his poetry, that he was not insane but trying to avoid punishment and being aided in this by influential friends. The media questioned the psychiatric reports; one psychiatric journal said, “Surely the psychiatrists know the difference between a political conviction and a delusion . . . Ezra Pound has no delusions in any pathological sense. But we have let ourselves be deluded — into a belief that responsibility is not responsibility, guilt not guilt, and incitement to hate not incitement to violence.” In the asylum Pound attracted the obviously welcomed attentions of George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party and John Kasper, an anti-integrationist working with the Ku Klux Klan. Pound wrote propaganda for Kasper who ran a small press and bookstore. When released as harmless, in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and over the next few years was involved in neo-Nazi activities and propagandizing until old age silenced him.

 

Admittedly by 1967 it was quite likely that he would’ve said little or nothing at Expo. Admittedly his treason was by modern standards in the distant past. Admittedly it was no crime to advocate fascism; US foreign policy was inclined to prefer fascist to communist or even social democratic governments. After the war, Eisenhower had played golf with Franco, and Klaus Barbie, on the Merex payroll, was helping the CIA fight communism and vacationing with his family in Paris. Admittedly factions involved in contemporary causes like fighting the war in Vietnam and freeing Quebec could appreciate aspects of Pound’s war against democracy and the “military-industrial complex.” But still one has to wonder what possessed Dudek and the committee. Pound was trouble. He was not welcome in the US, as the young poet Donald Hall, editor of the Paris Review, discovered. Not even the university English Departments would have him for readings and lectures. He did go to New York in 1969 to get an award from the Academy of American Poets, but a subsequent move by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to give him an award was thwarted by Lewis Mumford and Daniel Bell who stated “it does not follow that one honors a man who advocates a way of life that would make the world hellish.”

 

The Expo committee’s deliberations are, so far as I know, unavailable. Dudek’s attitude to Pound has been put on record by Dudek himself in numerous books and articles. Basically, he worshipped the man and the Cantos. This was because Pound was a great artist and promoter of art. Dudek believed that Pound was a fascist only for the sake of art. In his 1965 teaching anthology Poetry of Our Time, he said: “Pound became a partisan of Mussolini’s Fascism, which he saw in the light of his Renaissance theories of the heroic leader and the economic doctrine of social control on behalf of art and culture.” Dudek himself had little attraction to fascism, acknowledging a firm faith in democracy and socialism and a loyalty to the memory of Pound’s arch-enemy, President Roosevelt. But he wanted to know from Pound what the history of the twenty years of Mussolini’s government, the Ventennio, might indicate about policies that could encourage art and control capitalism. He seems to have studied the material that Pound recommended — fascist theorists like Sylvio Gesell, Luigi Villari (Pound gave Dudek an address), Odon Por and Camillo Pellizzi (another address). He paraphrases Pellizzi in a letter to Karl Shapiro, but it’s doubtful he got too far in these studies since most of the texts, like Pellizzi’s, were in Italian.

 

There’s no evidence that he located any interesting policies, and he gave up these studies quickly. Basically, he was not interested in politics and economics, continuing in his research as long as he did mostly out of deference to Pound, and with obvious reluctance. Also, not long after engaging with Pound, Dudek became an English professor, committing himself to an enterprise that practiced “social control on behalf of art.” In the English Department he had his “fascista,” a like-minded elite empowered by liberal democracy to teach literacy and values through literature. He was critical, from a reactionary point of view, of the policies and methods of the Department, but committed to the basic mandate. He had to answer to Pound for his commitment; the Department for Pound was a sort of privileged cultural steamroller that flattened criticism and literature itself into homogeneous liberal pulp. His letters to Dudek are laced with references to “halfmasted profs” and “scholarsheep.” He spoke of “the new ACADEmics . . . the new cowardice of those who unfrankly would write what they think will NOT get them in bad/masses of documentation as defense.” Dudek in his replies to Pound was always careful to distance himself from the professors, but Pound was not to be put off: “You profs OUGHT to groan for the shame of decadence in American letters in all dimensions save glitter of surface technique... ABSOLUTE allergy to pivotal thought....” Dudek humorously commented: “I refuse to accept blame for this, never having displayed much surface technique,” but still he was hurt that Pound thought of him as a professor more than a poet. The fact was that he had found in the Department an actual if imperfect manifestation of his overall faith in the social importance of art, stated most clearly in 1981: “I cannot imagine a great poem that goes against the social good; and I cannot imagine a good political or cultural order that denies the primacy of art.” The English Department lives in this faith.

 

Dudek might have added that he could not imagine a great poem written by an insane or evil person. The Cantos in Dudek’s opinion was a great poem and describes in some detail societies that, in Pound’s opinion, give art primacy. So Pound was a good man. His anti-Semitism was unfortunate but Dudek believed until near the end of his life that it was a result of “surface mania” resulting from his worries about the war, and was limited to Pound’s broadcasts and conversation and absent from the Cantos: “there is no specific anti-Semitism in the Cantos — a charge against Pound that has been raised — though there is a good deal of irritation against many creeds, nations, and individuals.” This is not quite true; it would be more accurate to say that there are very few anti-Semitic remarks in the Cantos. As for treason, Dudek always asserted that Pound was merely exercising his right to free speech in the American tradition “of radical self-criticism.” Again, there is something to this, and Pound and his supporters had considered building his defense against the charge of treason on freedom of speech. But can advocating surrender or the killing of top Jews be interpreted as “self criticism,” even of the “radical” sort?

 

Pound’s essential goodness, sincerity and intelligence were mainly confirmed for Dudek by the work Pound did for art. Dudek thought him to be the head architect of literary modernism and the only modernist who saw with full clarity the ugliness of western, liberal-democratic, capitalist civilization (“an old bitch gone in the teeth”), and was using his art to suggest an alternative. In Dudek’s view, Pound started and his friend William Carlos Williams finished the search for the most “organic” forms of verse, and Pound developed the most advanced literary critique of civilization and proposed the basic solution. As Dudek (and, one assumes, the Expo committee) interpreted it, that solution is not that everyone should opt for fascism, avoid taking interest and get rid of any Jews. Rather they should experience lots of great art, especially poetry. This would be Pound’s message, not an Expo version of the Nuremberg Rallies, but a Sermon on Mont Royal.

 

II

Dudek did admit at the time that he wasn’t totally sure about this. He mentions being relieved when Pound cancelled. Pound was a difficult mentor/prophet/messiah, mainly in that he didn’t think poetry could be apolitical, or exist as an isolated activity in a poet’s life. He seldom talked poetry with his acolytes or even his friends. If the message of a poem was important, that would be because it had been well thought-out. In this sense, economics, politics, philosophy etc are poetry. In March 1952 he said to Dudek, “another idiot thing is to study poetry apart from contemporary MENTAL activity.” Shortly after he expanded on this: Sophokles, Aristophanes, Dante, Shxpr/ALL aware of civic life/NOT trying to get a teaparty or suppress data . . . .” He wanted polemics from the small magazines — “sewing circle gazettes” — that Dudek and others brought to him, and he assigned readings that were entirely in history, politics and economics. He subjected even old friends like William Carlos Williams and e e cummings to this. For Dudek as for most English professors, whose role in the maintenance of standard English through literature was acknowledged and prescribed by liberal-democratic governments, Pound’s attitude was dangerous. Profs are supposed to be secular priests, not political leaders. It was not part of a prof’s job to lead students through the Cantos and out into the streets.

 

Another problem was that Pound’s conclusions were fixed, his researches aimed at cherry-picking supportive literary, historical and economic particulars for fascist attitudes and policies, passing over anything not supportive. Williams noticed that, over years of visits, Pound “has not budged a hair’s breadth from his basic position, he had recently entrenched himself more securely in it — recently finding precedents in the writings of a certain Controller of the Currency sixty or seventy-five years ago, who held similar views on our official perfidies.” Subject to these monomaniacal bouts of deductive reasoning, most admirers of Pound’s poetry backed off. Cummings said, “in everyone’s relationships with Mr. Pound there come . . . coolnesses.” Most of the young poets who visited him at St Elizabeths felt this. But Dudek never seems to have felt cool towards Pound, not until near the end of his life when he froze hard.

 

Charles Olson is a prominent example of the more measured response. A scholar, politician and would-be poet, he came to Washington immediately after the end of the war to cover Pound’s trial and, out of respect for Pound’s poetry, stayed to care for him. As it turned out he couldn’t stand the man or his politics. About anti-Semitism, Olson said, “No man can attack a race and remain useful to anyone as an artist.” Fascism was a different matter. The critiques of the great modernists, Pound, Yeats and Eliot, had led them to commitment to fascism or at least approval of some fascist policies. Olson said, “We have reached a situation in which several of our chief writers, in revolt against the cult of the common man, have come dangerously close to alliance with the cult of the elite. Pound went all the way over.” Olson was echoing his (and Pound’s) hero Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish them and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests.”

 

Recognizing himself as Pound’s “constitutional” opposite, Olson seldom argued with Pound. He felt guilty about this, but discovered that when he argued he embarrassed Pound and depressed himself. Pound had fallen; Olson couldn’t kick him. And Pound, as Williams said, wouldn’t move from his position. Olson didn’t have Dudek’s idea that Pound, because he was a great poet, had to be a good man. Rather he thought that, because Pound’s search for a fascist polity was the subject of his poetry, which was great poetry, his poetry had to contain a convincing critique of democracy and defense of fascism. In the critique, in particular, he was interested.

 

So he listened to Pound spout about his studies, some of which are alluded to in the Pisan Cantos, and he provided him with comforts. “Olson saved my life,” Pound said later. After three years of visits, when Pound was clearly settled in, comfortable and productive, and when Olson had had enough, Olson left for good, to confront Pound in his notes and poetry. He stated the problem: “The job, given the obvious I am a writer, to be as decisive, careless, productive, and direct as I was a politician. How to do that! There it is, brother.” The notes and poems were published posthumously in 1974. Critics now say that this period of confrontation resulted in Olson’s emergence as a major poet. For Olson, Pound represented the problem of critiquing a democratic society in poetry. The great modernists, as well as the defenders of fascism, “know what they fight against. We do not know yet what we fight for.” Olson asked, “How then shall we try men who have examined us more than we have ourselves?” Poets had to answer for the drift of the greatest of their own kind towards fascism: “I can’t figure out — how the questions raised by the Pound case have gone unexamined.”

 

Dudek, with his state-backed mandate to preach poetry and values, was never concerned enough to examine Pound’s critique of liberal democracy and his search for substitutes: “The point was to discover how Pound saw Fascism — what it meant to him — not what it might mean to political theorists in some objective sense.” He did not want to contribute to Pound’s studies, which he considered marginal to the Cantos and irrelevant to his own poetry: “I was interested in doing a lot for poetry, but not for an economic or political idea. My correspondence with [Pound] was therefore at cross purposes; and I don’t think I ever tried to hide this from him. I simply ignored things that did not concern me, or that rubbed me the wrong way.”

 

But Dudek couldn’t actually ignore Pound’s intellectual projects. Unlike Olson, he wanted things from Pound. He wanted to show his poems, to talk about Pound’s dealings with other great writers, to collect Pound’s opinions on literature and art, to make contacts through Pound, and (not incidentally) to acquire notes, table-talk and letters (Dudek got from Pound permission to publish them) that would connect his name to Pound’s. To accomplish all this, Dudek, as Doug (now George) Fetherling put it in his review of Dk, had to “oblige the master, at least for a time, however distasteful the obligation was.” Generally he succeeded. He got some discussion of art and literature and some introductions. But it was at the cost of incriminating himself in fascism.

 

Near the end of his life Dudek snapped and suddenly and mysteriously repudiated the master, claiming to have realized the very things about him that everyone else had long taken for granted. Pound was a fascistic, anti-Semitic, nasty person. Olson would agree. But Dudek went further. Pound had betrayed those like Dudek who believed in him and was a terrible poet. Olson would disagree, saying that Pound was seldom unclear about what he wanted and was one of the century’s best poets. Dudek went from one extreme to the other, and called in question his critical acumen which for decades had caused him to confirm that the Cantos was a great poem and to imitate it in his own writing.

 

Dudek had no choice but to cut and run. He’d never subjected to serious inductive enquiry his faith in art, in Pound as his prophet, and in the Cantos as the testament of that faith. Certainly he’d been assailed by doubts over the years, in connection with constant revelations of the extent of Pound’s anti-Semitism, with the failure of his own search for alternatives in socialism and fascism, with the ongoing lack of interest in his own Poundian poetry, and with Northrop Frye’s incisive, colorful and witty demonstrations that literature was essentially entertainment, never read for the reasons Dudek read and wrote it — for social polemics. But he’d ignored or denied all the doubts. For fifty years, he couldn’t believe that the writer of an obviously great poem could be a fascist and an anti-Semite. Then he couldn’t believe that a man who was obviously a fascist and anti-Semite could write a great poem.

 

Also Dudek’s faith in poetry and his reputation and sense of himself as a decent man and believer in democracy were threatened by ongoing revelations about Pound. Post-modernism was applying its regime of conscience on the university and was particularly sensitive about fascism, of which it approves in theory. By the 1990’s, Departmental post-modernist critics like Michael Tremblay and poet-critics like Robin Blaser and Frank Davey were celebrating Dudek as a predecessor and influence. Dudek’s connection to Pound was an attraction because post-modernism agrees with the fascist critique of liberal democracy. Fascism is, like post-modernism, a rejection of liberal-democratic, capitalistic society and of scientific reductionism, and a social experiment aimed at unifying society around people’s highest communal aspirations instead of around the aspirations of individuals. Most of the fascist theory that Dudek read portrayed fascism as, as Dudek’s source Pellizzi put it, “overcoming liberalism in constituting itself precisely as the instrument necessary for the endless, ethically grounded collective remaking of the world in history.” Fascism promised high status for the arts as the expression of communal aspirations. It seemed that this status would be a less compromised pulpit than the universities, a position closer to the Leader.

 

Of course post-modernist theory is aware of where fascist theory led — to the cult of the charismatic leader, to totalitarian forms of governance, to colonization and war as expressions of cultural aspirations, and to the idea that emphasis on individualism and intellect were, as Joseph Goebbels put it, “Jewish traits of character” and that liberal-democratic/capitalistic society was, accordingly, a Jewish conspiracy. But post-modernism wants to try again, avoiding these errors. Dudek is seen, by Blaser and Tremblay, as showing how they can be avoided. They see him as, as Blaser puts it, “an important voice” in correcting Pound’s “move toward a totalitarian vision [which] is a characteristic of modernism.” In the end, though, it seems that Dudek, just as he wasn’t so sure about Pound coming to Expo in 1967, wasn’t so sure in 1994 about his contribution to modernism. He saw his own drift towards fascism. He saw “wreckage.”

 

III

Dudek was able to sustain this literalist faith in poetry and Pound because he was stubborn by nature and because that faith settled in early in his life and in a broader, more dependable, more socially acceptable and ultimately more influential manifestation than Ezra Pound. That manifestation was the English Department, which Dudek, in effect, entered in high school. Prof Wynne Francis, who had studied under Dudek, wrote an important account of him in Canadian Literature in 1964 — an account that was certified by Dudek as factually accurate if unfortunate in its conclusions about his writing. Francis says that Dudek was converted from his immigrant family’s Catholicism to poetry by high-school studies in the anthology Poets of the Romantic Revival. He was captivated by the theme-oriented poetry/poetics of the English Romantics and their sense of the social importance of poetry as a guide to life. The Romantics had cultivated the traditional tendency of lyric poetry to tell people what they should think and feel. Their poetics — those of Keats (that poetry is “axioms felt along the pulse”), of Wordsworth (that poetry illustrates “in the language really used by men” how “feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement”) of Shelley (that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”) and of Arnold (that poetry replaces religion as a fountain of comfort and insight) — explained and justified what they were doing.

 

Inspired with a mission to improve society through poetry, Dudek went on to do a bachelor’s degree in English at McGill, then to study history and journalism at Columbia — an ambition deriving from his work in the mid-1930’s on The McGill Daily, then Canada’s foremost student newspaper, and from his job in an advertising agency through the first years of the war. But Francis describes how, by the late 1940’s, he had decided on English professoring over journalism, a choice encouraged by the example of one of his profs, Lionel Trilling, the great proponent of liberal education: “So it was that, as he began work on his doctoral thesis toward the end of his New York sojourn, he became not a journalist but a teacher. He found the experience not as alien to his taste as he had thought. He had previously believed that to be a journalist was to be in close touch with actualities. But journalists, to be successful, must too often take on the color of their times. Dudek wanted very much to change the color of the times, to be in a position to criticize and evaluate contemporary life. It was becoming clearer to him that for this purpose there were at least two more fundamental means than journalism. One was certainly poetry; and it began to seem likely that teaching was another.”

 

In becoming an English prof, Dudek joined a society that was all about affirming “the primacy of art” and exercising “social control on behalf of art and culture.” In discussing his move to McGill, he emphasized his sense of mission: “It may be that the worst teachers, as well as the best, are teachers with a mission, but I came with the confidence that I had something very important to teach. The first was modern poetry and literature . . . the second was the massive movement of European literature and thought since the 18th century, with its profound practical implications, which students’ minds still had to experience, like buckets of cold water thrown at them from a high lectern.” In the Department, this attitude and approach would be described as Arnoldian. Arnold had added a new dimension to the Romantic’s theme-based poetics when he inspired their use by the state in rationalizing its increasing interest in controlling, standardizing and spreading written English by means of the school system. Literature, which had always been used to teach literacy in both Latin and English, would become the discipline of a huge bureaucracy.

 

Dudek’s commitment to this bureaucracy and its mandate is acknowledged by both traditional and post-modernist professor-critics. The traditionalists, Francis and Aileen Collins, Dudek’s wife and editor, describe Dudek as “Arnoldian.” Collins says, in her introduction to In Defense of Art (1988), a collection of Dudek’s newspaper reviews and articles, “As a critic of culture, Dudek continues in the tradition of distinguished writers . . . . Matthew Arnold in his war on the Philistines was concerned with the whole problem of culture and the role of the arts in a world where religion had yielded to science . . . . The relation between art and life is an important theme in these articles: where art is not a vital part of man’s life, man regresses to barbarism.” Francis says, “Poetry, for Dudek, has a moral function to perform — moral in the Arnoldian sense of “a criticism of life.” Davey, the post-modernist, points out Trilling’s influence on Dudek: “Trilling viewed the writer not only as an Arnoldian ‘critic of culture’ but as an inheritor of humanity’s spiritual concerns.”

 

The Department made one important adjustment to Arnold’s theory — one that was essential perhaps to the Department’s position in the university, which was organized according to specialist disciplines. Arnold viewed science and poetry as replacing religion; the Department omitted science from the equation, teaching literature alone as (as Dewey and the Progressive Education Movement put it) “equipment for living” and the major source of topics and models for composition. Literature was, in effect, secular scripture, the Department was its church, composition was liturgical prayer and the professors were (as Coleridge and Arnold put it) a “clerisy” that expounded on secular scripture for the benefit of the laity. Dudek reveled in this role, dousing his students with buckets of literature, cleansing and shocking them to intellectual life with the enlightened wisdom of the Romantics. He acknowledged that literature was at least partly, as Frye said, a toy, and that it could not always be taken literally, but he thought that theme was what inspired and structured a literary work and what readers took away from it. Therefore, the more important and the clearer the message, the better the literary work. In 1960, he told his newspaper readers what he told his students — “look for the central meaning of a book, a large meaning related to human issues, and then see how this meaning serves as an organizing principle in the smallest details.”

 

In other words, there is a theme in a good poem that can be extracted as a generalization and applied to life. This is how Dudek appraised other poets, and this is the theory by which composition — including writing about literature — is taught in freshman English courses. Standard rhetorics like Sheridan Baker’s best-selling The Practical Stylist teach the formulation of a “thesis sentence” that expresses either a statement of intent or opinion that contains the structure of the entire essay/report. Induction enters through research which can modify the original generalization. The faith is that this sort of exercise teaches liberal thinking, and not simply a mechanized kind of rhetoric. Every composition would reflect the liberal remise that truth was open-ended, subject to refinement, the gift of method not conscience.

 

Dudek was by most accounts good at this, though he taught deductive more than inductive reasoning. He argued students away from any parochialism and towards enlightenment. Ruth R. Wisse, a student in the two-year “Great Writings of European Literature” class of 1954, has testified that Dudek “drove us through the modern classics like sheep before a storm. October 7: Candide; October 12: Zadig . . . . I stopped attending some of my other classes.” Wisse and her fellow students were mostly from immigrant families, and Dudek referred to his and their minority status, advising minority groups to follow his example, “to leave particularisms at the door, to experience as cosmopolitans our common Englightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Modernity.” Dudek worked too at establishing departmental policies. He fought hard in the sixties against New Left democratization of the department (the students eventually boycotted and shut down his “Great Writings” course as elitist and ethnocentric), against the teaching of creative writing, and for the teaching of Canadian literature (including French with English Canadian), and he participated in the establishment of what is now the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, a body that concerns itself with defining and protecting the professional interests of English profs.

 

But Dudek’s strong sense of mission precluded any questioning of the religion of literature — precluded, in short, the full use of the method he was supposed to be teaching. In this reactionary approach, Dudek wasn’t unusual. He fitted into the more antideluvian or conservative wing of the department, the “Generalist” professors who dominated the department from after World War I to the advent of “New Criticism” in the mid-thirties. “Generalism” is the assertion of the Arnoldian cause against the philologists and literary historians, who concerned themselves with the accuracy and contexts of literary texts. But Generalism also denies Arnold’s humanistic view of science as a secularizing, liberalizing force. Arnold promoted scientific training as a part of liberal education — in his response to Thomas Henry Huxley, who accused him of applying a mere “tincture of belles letters” to the serious wounds of the world, Arnold argued the presence of the great scientific classics like Newton’s Optics and Darwin’s The Origin of the Species in the literary canon. The Generalists found these, along with the classics of philosophy, intimidating and of limited value. They wanted to emote on the social implications of literature, especially poetry. Also, they did not want to track sources, influences and word meanings or build aesthetic arguments for the canon. This involved inductive thinking and was for the Specialists and later too for the New Critics who ultimately took over the Department with what they claimed was a more scientific approach.

 

Generalists — unlike their post-modernist successors — take the canon, and the official interpretation of the canon, on faith. Through the first half of the twentieth century, scholars like Irving Babbitt and Lionel Trilling swung humanism and the Department away from science and its reductionist, relativistic attitude to values. Science, they felt, cut the secularizing hand that used it, promoted reason over imagination which led to nihilism, and served the “barbarizing plutocracy,” as an early Generalist James Russell Lowell put it. Lowell acquired Babbitt as his most important disciple, and Babbitt taught Trilling, who taught Dudek, Meanwhile the great modernists, while they had no axe to grind with science itself (Pound and Williams liked to think their poetics were based in science), were fighting against “ideas” in poetry and questioning liberalism. The Department entered the 20th century with its course set dead against the thinking of the great modernist poets that it would soon have to teach to its students.

 

Pound immediately became a problem. Eliot — because he produced, in addition to great poetry, a body of literary criticism that was superior to that of any professor, because he critiqued the most famous of the professors like Babbitt, Leavis, Richards and Lowes, and because he argued that poetry could not replace religion — was an ongoing embarrassment. Dudek’s commitment to Eliot and Pound was a problem for him within the Department, but the system guaranteed his security. And, about these poets, the Department simply had to believe that, if their poetry was great, their messages had to be liberal and beneficial to society. Dudek would, perhaps, prove this to be the case.

 

IV

Dudek’s impassioned, thematic and generalizing poetics made him a good lecturer, as Wisse indicates. It also made him a good book reviewer. For decades he served as a sort of literary Jack Webster or Link Byfield in the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette. In his newspaper reviews and essays his vehement, faith-based, often contradictory opinions were actually an advantage. What he says in praise of Robert Graves as a critic is a good description of himself. “No matter how prejudiced and eccentric, forthright opinions always make good reading,” he begins, “perhaps because even the most preposterous contain a certain shadow of truth.” This truth, for Dudek, emerges in Grave’s epithets and adjectives: “Wordsworth assumed a righteousness proportionate to his sense of guilt,” “poetic prodigies [Dylan Thomas] are monstrous and ill-starred,” Milton is a “trichomaniac” and Eliot a “Lycophronic.” Blake was ruined because “poetry and prophesy make ill-assorted bedfellows” and “Dylan Thomas was rhetorical and insincere.” Like Graves, Dudek is iconoclastic and punchy in his journalism. Avison’s poetry, he says, is “God-intoxicated,” Gustafson’s poetry is stuffed with references to science, religion, art history, music history, journalistic lore and his own private life but “the blender is set at rough grind,” Newlove’s poetry is “the beginning of psychotherapy . . . and needs to find a theme, and Woodcock’s argument is “sentimental regionalism.” In each of these statements the over-exaggeration casts an obvious “shadow of truth,” a torpedo scores a direct hit.

 

As Collins points out, “There is a major irony at work throughout Dudek’s years as a newspaper critic and reviewer. In Literature and the Press . . . his position is clear . . . . Yet he persisted in believing that it was possible to use the media . . . with intelligence and integrity . . . . The tension between his overt distaste for mass media and his desire to speak to a public is what infuses these newspaper pieces with such driving energy . . . He is conscious of his divided emotions and the inherent danger in his position. As he notes: ‘Even writing for the newspapers would be a kind of betrayal — perhaps especially writing for the newspapers.’” In short, Dudek was turned on by an activity that he believed was illicit. His ideal medium turned out to be one he didn’t believe could work because it was profit-driven and aimed at selling the status quo. His own experience as a journalist proved either that newspaper editors and readers were not by a long shot all lotus eaters or that his own reviews were “naturally” dumbed down because his poetics were simplistic. But Dudek ignored all that, never seeming worried that the forces he had portrayed as destroying the geniuses of Dickens, Carlyle and Thackeray could touch him. Never seeing that he was dumbing anything down.

 

Dudek’s scholarly books and essays are less successful. Here, the appeal is supposed to be through inductive logic. The theory books, Literature and the Press (1960), The First Person in Literature (1967) and Technology and Culture (1979) are ignored or compared negatively to books with similar topics by McLuhan, George Grant and Frye. What Davey said about the first one applied to them all — they are “weakened by a confusion of coincidence and cause.” That is, Dudek never tries to straighten out what features of, say, a Dickens novel are products of the technical and economic demands of highly capitalized print technology and what originate in Dickens’ psyche. He fails to consider how attention to audience might have strengthened Dickens work as well as weakening it — or, in Carlyle’s case, how a materialistic society aroused and sharpened his analytical and satirical powers more than it limited them.

 

As to Dudek’s scholarly criticism, Desmond Pacey in Creative Writing in Canada (1961) called it “controversial and angry.” The Departmental ideal was scholarly detachment. For Dudek, this meant politeness, which the Department confused with objectivity. Dudek was never polite. Even fans like Blaser, who edited a selection of Dudek’s poetry Infinite Worlds (1988) and who celebrated Dudek’s post-modern “openmindedness,” admitted that he was often “polemical,” “opinionated” and “harsh.” Terry Goldie, in his summarizing account of Dudek in Canadian Writers and Their Works (1985) said, “Dudek has taken what amounts to a moral stance on the importance of the idea as presented by a committed individual. From this position, he has engaged in debate with opposing forces with a vigor which has at times approached verbal warfare.”

 

For Dudek as a poet and as a professor, it was important that socially relevant themes be conveyed clearly. The state of civilization was seriously degraded; decisive measures were needed. His sense of urgency is expressed in the preface to his poems in one of his earlier collections, Cerebus (1952): “People have always known, before the age of machines and mechanistic science, that it is imagination — as poetry, faith, ethics — which gives order and beauty to life. Modern man, become a tool of industrial, commercial, and political machinery, believes that this work of the imagination is false, trivial, or irrelevant: a belief that makes him the petty monster that he is . . . a Prufrock, a Babbitt, a Boob. The way to freedom and order in the future will lie through art and poetry. Only imagination, discovering man’s self and his relation to the world and to other men, can save him from complete enslavement to the state, to machinery, the base dehumanized life which is already spreading around us.”

 

Seeing himself as an aesthetic Jeremiah, Dudek attacked any critic or poet who downplayed message or who failed to present the right message or fudged in the direction of politeness. In Poetry of Our Time he ranges through the great modernists, praising (for the most part) their social criticism but discounting their approach to or attempts at solutions: “Yeats was a bitter critic of our age. But he never presented clearly or specifically what it was he objected to in middle-class life, or what virtues he admired in the peasantry and aristocracy. His attitudes remain personal and temperamental . . . . “Frost’s theme of nature . . . makes him perhaps too universal to be entirely relevant to the special problems of today. The problems of modern life and culture are urban.” “On the whole, the single-minded religious approach of T. S. Eliot to the complex problems of modern life does not seem to be objective enough.” Williams and Cummings fail in their criticism of society: “Unlike Eliot and Pound, they are willing to accept the twentieth-century universe, at least in its moments of rare delight, and refrain from too much thought.”

 

Only Pound is adequate: “Pound sees poetry as “having a mission, as being a relevant kind of communication about the great issues. . . . He is a great artistic craftsman, in fact a kind of literary forger who can reproduce at will the poetry and beauty of any past age: but his position is so uncompromising and critical that few readers dare to meet him on his own terms. His admirers are still a minority, but his influence in poetry is nevertheless very great. Perhaps no one so well as he epitomizes the predicament of modern poetry, the poet pitted against his age, and to all intents defeated by the immense pressures of actuality. And yet in the long run — who knows — the decision may be reversed in his favour.”

 

Of Dudek’s contemporary poets, three groups attracted his wrath. First, there was the disparate bag of poets who failed to engage in social criticism or followed Williams in making any criticism too personal, and/or who regarded poetry as entertainment or, as Al Purdy put it, “its own objective justification.” Most of these poets subsisted outside the Department, though there are few twentieth century poets who could be entirely independent. Purdy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen in Canada and Robert Creeley in the US “lacked seriousness.” Layton, Dudek’s earliest literary friend and associate in assorted publishing ventures, was finally repudiated as “demented” for rejecting organic rhythms and falling into the rhetorical ones of the 17th Century. This rhetoric obscured his messages. Cohen, Dudek’s student, whose first book had been published by Dudek, forsook serious art in order to satisfy the demands of the mass audience. He became the Pied Piper of the spoiled legions of the New Left — the students who, in the Sixties, as Wisse notes in her memoir of student life at McGill, protested the elitism and conservatism of Dudek’s Great Writings course and forced him to shut it down. Purdy seems to have been admired by Dudek for his studies of the disappearance of rural life, “but this has not yet become a tragic idea, nor yet a metaphysic.” Also, Purdy writes surprisingly well about the disappearance of Indian cultures and the destruction of the environment. However, neither of these issues is “important to Canadian life and imagination.” In other words, Purdy approaches social criticism, but doesn’t get to the heart of it — portraying the evils of capitalism and scientific methodology.

 

The poet-profs who adhered to the New Criticism (which also provided the basic approach to creative writing) were too intellectual or studied. It was all technique, no original message that was applicable to modern circumstances: “Anything but well-aimed speech, anything but words that teach, anything but conviction, anything but a guide to action.” This was the poetry of John Crow Ransom and Alan Tate in the US and Ralph Gustafson and A.J.M. Smith in Canada. Gustafson’s poems, for example, “lack visceral drive, committed passion: his best are artificial poems, polished mantel-piece decorations . . . .” The criticism of these writers pretended to prove through analysis what was imaginative and what was not. Proof involved the cataloguing of metaphors, sound effects and ambiguities. According to Dudek, this confused analysis with response and failed to deal with overall meaning, which is “primary in all works of literature.” In an article on Cleanth Brooks, a famous textual critic, he says “I find no criticism so boring as the modern explication de texte, ‘the nadir of solemn and elaborate imbecility,’ as Ezra Pound once described it. No one can prove anything, in art.” As a prof, Dudek opposed the teaching of creative writing — introduced into Canada through the forties and fifties by Earle Birney — as a trivializing of literature into mere technique.

 

As well as attacking the adherents of New Criticism, Dudek attacked those of structuralism, especially the poets that he felt were influenced by Canada’s great structuralist critic, Frye: Daryl Hine, Phyllis Webb, Rames Reaney, Margaret Avison and Margaret Atwood. Other than complaining that these poets are too obsessed by allusions to myth, which they gleaned entirely from their reading, to look at life, Dudek declined to grant them the dignity of detailed response. He directed his attack at their master, Northrop Frye, who was himself the single biggest challenge, after T. S. Eliot, to the Department’s methodology and self-esteem.

 

V

As Davey and Blaser indicate, Dudek’s ongoing debate with Frye makes a good illustration, through opposition, of his poetics. Second to this is his attack on another illustrious colleague, media critic Marshall McLuhan. Dudek called Frye “the Kant of criticism” (an epithet meant as an insult but likely taken by Frye as the highest praise) and saw the works of McLuhan (and his social-science guru Harold Innis) as “typical products of modern scholarship, the hysterical accumulation of facts straining toward a generalization equal in vastness and expense to the footnotes and particulars.” McLuhan and Innis illustrated the “megalomania of Hegelian theorizing plus Newtonian atomizing.” Frye is the Antichrist in Dudek’s religion. Dudek found him satanically appealing in his wit and many of his judgments. He argued that he was a sort of poet, and believed that his theory, a structuralist (plot-based) elaboration of Aristotle’s classifications into Ptolemaic complexity, was really “dogmatism in behalf of a veiled Christianity.” Again, this is an interesting insight — Frye’s argument that the Bible was another literary work can also be seen as an argument that all literature is an extension of the Bible. Frye had been an itinerant preacher before he became a prof.

 

Frye irritated Dudek for two reasons. First, he pretended to the authority of science. The Anatomy proceeds deductively (Pound’s method) but with negative incidences included and the heavy use of qualifiers like “as a rule,” and “usually.” And Frye claims that the schematics of the Anatomy are based on “an inductive survey of literary texts.” Second, Frye’s so-called ‘science” projected a view of the poet as a mere medium for psychological forces — of the id or superego — originating outside of consciousness. The superego, fuelled by social tradition — a poet’s culture — was a body of myths that, rather than ideas as the Romantics thought, provided the structures of literary works. These myths are learned by reading literature. As Dudek puts it, “Frye holds that all advanced development in art comes out of preceding art.” The poet studies poetry, not his own times. The poet’s experience of poetry, not his experience of life, determines his poetry just as in Innis and McLuhan communications media determine how experience is received. All three thinkers model humans as automatons, throw free will and imagination out the window. Frye, seeing poets in this way, was the worst.

 

Frye actually mocked the idea that poets could think, especially about poetry. Their poetics was an enumeration of the superstitions that helped them write — what Eliot identified and recommended as “workshop criticism.” Wordsworth’s idea that he was writing the language of ordinary people was as relevant to any explanation of his poetry as his habit of writing while walking. Similarly attempts of Imagists and Pound, Williams and Eliot to say it in things and not in ideas merely generated another kind of rhetoric; rhyme and meter were as “natural” as free verse. Eliot’s idea that poetry peaked with Anglo-Catholicism (i.e. before Milton) was an expression of religious faith not of critical appraisal. All of these are examples of why only critics, thinking inductively, could speak for literature. This extended to any social opinions expressed by poets. Eliot had the ludicrous idea that a return to Anglo-Catholicism was necessary to save civilization. Pound that Mussolini would save it. This put them at the level of D. H. Lawrence, who believed that sexual and social problems would be eased if people flogged or were flogged by their servants, children and spouses to establish blood bonds. “Writers are often rather simple people,” Frye said. “You certainly wouldn’t turn to contemporary poets for guidance and leadership in the twentieth-century world.”

 

Frye says of literature, “you don’t relate it directly to life or reality,” “it is really a refuge or escape from life, a self-contained world . . . a world of play or make-believe.” Frye laughed at modern “realism” as just another myth; imagination doesn’t hold the mirror up to some fixed reality but “constructs possible models of human experience.” Frye would define Dudek’s literalist sense of the relationship of life to literature as “the horizontal perspective.” Drawing a direct connection between Pound’s poetry and his politics would be an example of this fallacy — it would be like praising or objecting to The Divine Comedy because it advocated Catholicism. No one reads literature for polemics or abstract truth. Frye would say that it’s the “vertical” meanings that are important, the “up” of wish-fulfillment, and the “down” of anxiety dreams, the “up” of vision and the “down” of nightmare.

 

According to Frye, Yeats, Pound and Eliot, for example, saw western civilization in terms of the “down” myth, of which there are assorted versions depending on which historical period attracts you the most. Old people and Romantic poets like Wordsworth see society peaking in the agrarian past when they were children. After that, it’s all downhill. Survivalists think everything after the Stone Age is down. Hippies bewail the move from agriculture to manufacturing, but see technology as leading us up from the pit of mass production to anarchist heaven, where primary production will not involve getting dirty. Classicists see the world entering the dark ages after the fall of Rome. Aesthetes like Pound select an age — in Pound’s case the Renaissance — that produced what they see as the greatest art. Mystics like Yeats favor millennial theories that have society going up or down in 1000-year oscillations. Catholics (or Anglo-Catholics like Eliot) see the Middle Ages as the highest point. About Eliot’s Catholic theory, Frye says in T. S. Eliot (1963): “According to this, the height of civilization was reached in the Middle Ages, when society, religion and the arts expressed a common set of standards and values. This does not mean that living conditions were better then — a point which could hardly matter less — but that the cultural synthesis of the Middle Ages symbolizes an ideal of European community. All history since represents a degeneration of this ideal. Christendom breaks down into nations, the Church into heresies and sects, knowledge into specializations....”

 

Dudek was repulsed by Frye’s inductive relativism, saying, “Frye’s statements were contrary to everything I myself practice and believe.” For Frye, themes and messages were extrapolated from story, not delivered directly. This was the case even in lyric poetry, where the poet was taken to be a character rather than an authority. Dudek’s view of himself as a modernist poet presumed a desperate situation that was real, not just a matter of perspective, not the playing out of some pre-determined human fate that literature and art have described over and over in terms of changing historical contexts. The decline of western civilization, the degradation of the masses, and the rise of materialism, relativism and nihilism due to fascination with the triumphs of scientific methodology was recent and real, and it made no difference that some things had improved, that democracy had triumphed (at least temporarily) over fascism and allowed more freedom to the masses, devising legislation to give equal rights to the sexes and races, that science cured diseases that were previously inescapable and fatal. All of that, as Frye said, “could hardly matter less” to Dudek. Dudek was locked into his “story.”

 

Frye was telling Dudek that he should see himself in that story — as an educated simpleton attached to the “down” myth. He was, like Eliot and Pound, an aesthetic puritan who didn’t like anything about modern society or the masses and got a kick out of seeing himself as an embattled Jeremiah of taste. For Frye, the extreme language of the Preface to Cerebus would illustrate that Dudek’s complaints about society were not real. They were expressions of an “attitude” cultivated by Dudek, and that is how readers would take them. Frye would point out that, in anything else but a poetry book, Dudek’s preface would’ve attracted the attention of the commies, the RCMP or a psychiatrist. Dudek’s attitude arises out of his reading (note the references to the common man as a Prufrock and a Babbitt), not out of his experiences. Dudek’s job as a poet was to put himself into Jeremiah as Eliot put himself into Prufrock and Pound into Ulysses. His job was to tell his own story objectively, to contextualize his rants in myth. Similarly, as a professor, his job was to extract the structures, not just the themes, of literary works and establish their classification as and centrality to specific mythologies. He was not up there to expound on the social relevance of messages — that was for philosophers and social scientists, whose offices were just down the hall.

 

 

VI

Anything that forced Dudek into self-examination might’ve been an improvement. If Dudek’s faith in poetry suffered from obvious flaws and the lack of inductive proof, it also failed to provide results where they mattered — in poetry. Dudek’s Jeremiads were never convincing as poetry. Dudek, who stated so forcefully and decisively what verse forms were “organic” and what messages were “relevant,” could not produce those forms and messages in poetry. As a result, most of his poetry had to be published in his own magazines and anthologies and by his own presses. Also, Dudek was ejected, years ago, from the major anthologies. The comprehensive four-volume New Canadian Library anthology, published in 1964, omits him. So does the Oxford series of teaching anthologies edited by Gary Geddes (Fifteen Canadian Poets – 1970 - 2001) and by Toronto professors Donna Bennett and Russell Brown (A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English – 2002). Finally, there is relatively little criticism written about Dudek — as opposed say to his early and close associates Layton and Cohen.

 

Of course Dudek’s poetry received positive attention in one important way — it served as the basis for professional development and sabbatical support from the university. This was due largely to the New Critics who had connected the writing of poetry to the analysis of rhetoric. Not only could good poets of necessity write good literary criticism, but they could also effectively teach rhetoric and mark papers. Poets flooded into the universities, most of them surprised to find that they had skills valued by society, dismayed at the uses to which those skills were put. Most of the great New Critics — Ransom, Tate, Blackmur — were poets. Though Dudek opposed these developments, he benefited from them. Academic vitae could legitimately include creative as well as scholarly (Specialist) and critical (Generalist) writing. It didn’t matter who published Dudek’s books (even if it was Dudek himself) or what the critics said. The academic dean liked the books. Their titles could be listed in promotional materials and submitted in progress reports to the Board of Governors.

 

However, the main response from critics — most of them profs — to the bulk of Dudek’s oevre has always been polite silence, usually managed by deflecting attention from Dudek’s poetry to his qualities as a good citizen of the Canadian Parnassus. Dudek published books and published and edited magazines and anthologies, giving a whole new generation of poets a chance to be heard. Dudek doused a generation of students with the cold truths of the Enlightenment (laced with cautionary warnings about the Promethian, Faustian, Frygian, McLuhanesque, Innisian spell of science). He was praised for everything but poetic inspiration. Pacey says: “The strength of Dudek’s work lies in his strenuous attempt to give as purely as possible the experience which is pure and isolated in his own mind. The result is seldom brilliant or profound but it is always genuine.” This is to praise someone as a hard worker regardless of the results of that work. Munro Beatty in the Literary History of Canada II (1965) seems to be making the same point when he recommends the long poems over the short ones “to a reader who wishes to enjoy Louis Dudek’s gifts at their fullest stretch. In spite of some irksome echoes of Ezra Pound, the tone and temperament are unmistakably Dudek’s. This means that, although the language may sometimes be flat and the ideas banal, we are listening to the voice of a poet who can be depended upon to sound always like a decent and honest human being.”

From non-academic sources, criticism has been harsh. At least part of what seems to most readers as the obvious truth came very early from the American poet/publisher Cid Corman, one of the young American poets introduced to Dudek by Pound. Corman wrote Irving Layton saying of Europe: “I find it bad journalism, bad poetry, and bad thinking. The frequency with which he uses abstract adjectives ..., especially ‘beautiful’ is frightening. And Louis is so often the naivest tourist imaginable. His ‘social’ bearing is so hollow, his perceptions so cliché, his responses so predictable. There are occasional idioms of strength, but can I say sweet nothings about scant phrases . . . ? To say this is the diffusest possible kind of Poundian writing would only be accurate.” Robert Creeley also wrote to Layton: “I cannot damn well stand what he is doing. It grates on my nerves like a file.” Pound himself responded to Dudek’s poetry with silence, as Dudek admitted: “I sent Pound, over the years, a tidy selection of my own poems, to give him a good idea of what kind of poet I was ... But his spout was tightly screwed in, so that it only shot out its own stuff, it was not open to anything like this coming from outside.”

 

Silence, in aesthetic matters, is rejection, and the silence continues, laced with periodic outbursts of noisy rejection. Journalist-poet Fraser Sutherland, in a review of Visible Worlds, a selection of Dudek’s poems edited by Blaser, says that Blaser in his introduction “loads on superlatives about Dudek’s work, calling such long poems as En Mexico ‘a marvel of detail, image and rhythm’ and the ongoing Continuation a ‘great meditative poem.’” Actually, says Sutherland, “the worth of a Dudek poem is inversely proportionate to its length.” Sutherland repeats Corman’s criticism, citing Dudek’s “unresting banality of thought,” “triviality of image,” “tin-eared colloquialisms” and “preachiness.” Gradually some of the professor-critics started to sing the same tune — Dudek was no danger after he retired in 1983. Prof-poet Carmine Starnino repeated Sutherland’s complaints in a review of Dudek’s last book of poems, The Surface of Time (2001): “Dudek’s poetry has always seemed to me to be of the sort that has ‘gone wrong.’ I’ve always been bothered by the platform quality of his voice. Dudek is an ideas man with strong opinions and an unsophisticated ear who writes line that bang with the tinniness of his assertions.”

 

Dudek’s only supporters are the post-modernist prof-poets-critics. With the exception of Davey, they tend to argue horizontally: the poetry is good because its messages are good. Prof-critic Michael Tremblay says, “Dudek was always more rational than Pound, even if more philosophical and abstract.” Blaser says that Dudek is (despite his polemics “which can certainly shake a reader up”) open-minded. He is also (despite charges of being elitist and reactionary) “persistently democratic.” And finally he is (despite the rarity of “lyric moments” in his prosaic poetry) a “major” poet. Blaser is shoveling hard here, as we shall see, in the interests of post-modernism, but at least he is mentioning the difficulties that most readers have with Dudek. Ultimately the post-modernists argue that Dudek’s obscurity as a poet is a sign of his greatness, an argument that Dudek would support as he believed that the modern poet must necessarily, like Jeremiah and Pound, be embattled. Were Dudek’s poetry admired by the masses, as Cohen’s is, that would be sure proof to the post-modernists that he was not a serious poet.

 

Only Davey, among the post-modernists, acknowledges that Dudek is authoritarian, anti-democratic, and moralistic: “Dudek, like Pound, Eliot, Trilling and Ortega, is thoroughly elitist in his concepts of literary value and talent. For Dudek, the principles of democracy and democratic taste are inimical to great art.” Only Davey tries to deal with the judgments of Corman, Sutherland and Starnino. He admits that Dudek’s early short lyrics and later long lyrical travelogues feature a moralizing tendency. The language is prosaic, eschewing metaphor and depending for effect on clear description. In the short lyrics, which “build from anecdote or observation to a punchline of humour or philosophy,” this works. But in the long poems “passages of description ... seem more like the illustrations for a sermon than particulars from which the poem’s generalizations have proceeded.” Davey acknowledges that the long poems were influenced by Pound, but says that this is only superficial. Pound and Dudek had a major conflict over abstraction in poetry and life. Pound was an Imagist, a poet of particulars. In one of his letters, Pound says to Dudek, “get away from the shit of symbolism... leaf is a LEAF/that is enough/it has infinite implications./LOOK at it. look at the leaf/don’t try to make it into/a symbol of something ELSE.” Dudek couldn’t accept this: “This is Pound’s familiar stance, in relation to “the thing” or the image; a position useful as a counter-prod to symbolic over-importation of meanings. But linguistically it is nonsense, since word cannot simply be equated to thing; it carries much more ... and the whole power of art derives from the fact that ‘things’ in a work of art become representative things, that is, general concepts.”

As Davey points out, if Pound’s problem is the obscurity of his particulars, Dudek’s is banality and repetition of his generalizations. But as Davey sees it Dudek is working towards a poetry that is likely to find an audience once people understand the important cultural criticism that rises from the particulars that Dudek does identify as problematic. Davey’s argument is tortured, but his point seems to be that audiences will understand because Dudek worked to make it impossible to isolate the style and structure of his poems from their meanings. This act of isolating form from content is what conventional critics do, so that the audience can “’respect’ the poems while continuing to practice the values the poems condemn.” Note that Davey assumes that such condemnation is the main business of poetry. That culture can step around this “reflects not on the weakness of the works but on the determination of the culture to neutralize literature as a force for social change.” Dudek’s “honesty,” alluded to by conventional critics more as a sign of failure, is in his attempt to write poetry that counteracts this cultural tendency by specifying its message. Eventually, this poetry will succeed.

 

Davey seems to be devising an argument that bad is good, that abstractions and moral judgments can be inspiring, but actually he remains ambivalent as to whether such poetry can really be good. If the Cantos and Waste Land are good, the possibility of separating their form from their content not reflecting on their weakness, then maybe Dudek’s poems can’t be good. Davey only “believes” that Dudek is on the right track, on the grounds that his ideas are politically correct, condemning values practiced by society. According to Davey, Dudek is to poetry what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is to communism — a possibly lengthy and painful, but a necessary, transition to a new age when poetry will be “a force for social change.” Davey is one of the few post-modernists who believes that theory must prove itself in aesthetically satisfying literature and in social action. He has found no signs that this has happened yet — even the writings of favored compatriots like George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt ultimately fail to show the possibility of concerted social action for the general good. But Davey’s favorites at least try to avoid resolving their plots in terms of individual transcendence.

 

Meanwhile Blaser and Davey are plagued by Ken Norris, who claims to be part of that new age, dreaming of Dudek as his adoptive father and continuing the criticism of civilization in a long poem intended as a report on the second half of the twentieth century and an extension of The Waste Land. Norris, blessed by Dudek in 1980, continues his critique of civilization, but affirms the primacy of art by using his poetry to wage a kind of guerrilla war against “the system:” “Silence means assent/So I go on talking, try to filibuster the present policies, in doing so only cancel out my life’s actions, perhaps, in that way, do some good. Every day I don’t go off to work I undermine the system. I really believe that. Those days I not only say no, I do no.” Poetry affirms its social importance by obstructing communication; poets-profs by invoking the sick-leave clauses of their collective agreements to stay home and write filibusters.

.

Norris seems to be a far cry from the uses of art as preached by Dudek and Pound. Dudek wouldn’t book off sick to write — to do so would subvert his civilizing mission as a Generalist prof. And both Dudek and Pound would be repulsed by the idea of poetry as obstructive noise rather than as incisive criticism of civilization. It was his thematic impact that first attracted Dudek to Pound — his cultivation of Imagism and free verse as a medium for an effective critique of modern civilization. The two were connected: the focus on particulars made the message powerful. It was only later that Dudek argued for free verse on the grounds that it facilitated the clear expression of abstractions, that he excluded himself from the “necessary corrective” of Imagism and returned to “Arnoldian” moralizing

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In the early 1940’s, Dudek started pushing Pound onto decisively-not-interested literary friends like Raymond Souster and Layton. Both of these poets were reluctant and ultimately unsuccessful converts. Both entertained a vague faith in the social and personal benefits of self-expression, and uttered the usual complaints against modern materialism, complaints that characterize poets from Wordsworth to Pound. But they were not much into the politicizing of art though Layton was for a time a communist. They seemed to take Dudek’s extreme faith in the social benefits of art as a personal quirk: Dudek was less anarchistic than them, more cerebral and serious. Souster and Layton joined the armed forces during the war; Dudek refrained, believing that it was necessary to defeat the fascists but too sickly to volunteer or be conscripted. In any case he was against conscription on principle. Layton thought of Dudek as a “seminarian.” In describing their first meeting, Layton says, “My imagination at once put a clerical collar around his neck.” Souster was into the early imagistic work of Pound’s friend William Carlos Williams, regarding the orgiastic, lung-busting, operatic and barely comprehensible diatribes of Pound as an affront to Imagism. He referred to the clique of poets around Pound as a “cult.”

 

Also, while Layton and Souster carped at big capital and the rat race, they didn’t share Dudek’s or Pound’s or Eliot’s, or even the English Department’s, pontifical attitude and seldomly qualified disgust with the masses. More like Williams, they actually saw wisdom in the masses. Williams learned wisdom and language from his patients and other plain folk in his vicinity — he figured out Pound through a taxi-driver, who picked him up outside St. Elizabeths and told him, “He ain’t crazy. He just talk too much.” Souster took on the role of a spokesman for average people and Layton thought of himself as their messiah. But Pound had attacked capitalism, and this Souster and Layton took as his main attraction for Dudek. In his memoirs Layton said of Dudek in the early years of their friendship (1943), “His outlook was more Poundian than mine, even then, though I don’t think he had read too much of Pound at this point. Dudek’s attack was on a civilization which capitalism had spawned. So his concern was with culture, mine with the individual’s place in it, and with economics, which I considered the most significant factor in defining culture. But Louis and I loathed the capitalist system with equal intensity and wished to see it replaced by co-operative socialism.” On this basis, Layton and Souster became for a time Dudek’s most important partners in publishing Canada’s young poets.

 

In 1949, in an article in First Statement, Dudek revealed in detail his thinking about Pound’s poetry. In comparing F. R. Scott, who he regarded at the time as the best of the established Canadian poets, to Pound, he describes how Scott and Pound started their mature poetry with satire. Scott became “a clever preacher of the Enlightenment talking down to his dull brethren.” Pound, in Mauberley (1920), went deeper. Often, Scott is “too obviously a socialist writing socialistic verse.” Pound is more individualistic, “a poet distracted by the times into shouting out a political message in regards to “a social miasma that he realized lay at the root of his troubles.” Both then moved on to “more conventional subjects of poetry,” but Pound’s Cantos are richer than “the serious lyrics in Scott’s best book, Overture (1945).” This is because Pound had “grounds previously prepared” in “a richer civilization than that of the bourgeoisie.” In earlier books of poems and poetic replications and translations he had explored the literature of the ancient Greeks, of the renaissance and of the east. Scott’s “ground previously prepared” was the late Victorian mode practiced in his own early poems and by his father, F. G. Scott. This ground was “bourgeois” and so could not nourish great poetry. By contrast, Pound’s backward movement was actually “a retreat that could as easily be called an advance.” The Cantos turned into “an epic poem to show when the arts and civilization are sound, when corrupt,” and “an historical and realistic criticism of society, a demand for total health in life and art.” Through his digression and retreat, Pound arrived at “a conception of the organic unity between society in all its ramifications (especially economics) and the fine arts.” In a contorted nutshell, this is what Dudek thought about Pound until near the end of his life.

 

Here is the essence of Dudek’s thinking on the role of modernist poetry. It has two purposes — first to point out the failures of liberal democracy (especially its partnership with corporate capitalism), and second to portray how an ideal society is based on messages conveyed by art. Both Scott and Pound accept this mandate, but Pound more successfully, especially in terms of the second part of the mandate.

 

At this time, Dudek started a series of long poems that seemed to use Pound’s epic as a model. These were Europe (1954), En Mexico (1958), Atlantis (1967) and Continuation, a poem in five parts that Dudek worked on from 1968 until his death. A. J. M. Smith referred to Europe as “Pound cake.” This is a good and useful joke. It implies that Dudek’s poems are a confection of Poundian ingredients more than a real elaboration on Pound, and this is true as regards their structure. Dudek’s poems share the theme of the decline of western civilization, the list of the great things from the past compared to the list of the evils of the present, and the lecturing or hortatory voice that uses comic colloquialisms, direct quotations and the end-stopped line or stacked phrases and clauses. But Dudek’s long poems are as Blaser says first-person travel narratives, whereas the Cantos feature, with the first-person lyrics, dramatic monologues — voices other than Pound’s explaining themselves and telling stories. The great models of superior humanity — Ulysses, Sigismundo Malatesta, Elizabeth I and her attorney general Lord Coke, Thomas Jefferson, etc. — who rightfully dominate and mold civil society because of their strength of character — walk the stage.

 

The Cantos are dramatic, replicating historical events and exhibiting no narrative continuity. In place of that, the dramatic monologues and historical sketches exhibit narrative parallels with one another and with Pound’s personal situation — his studies, his heroes, his adherence to fascism and Social Credit, his incarceration. Dudek’s long poems are first-person ruminations with clear beginnings and endings and explicitly stated complaints about capitalism and speculations about the emptiness of materialism. Davey says that Dudek adds to the Poundian mix “a clearly defined moral and intellectual (i.e. ‘religious’) context,” but most critics don’t see any such context — the messages are clear and honest only in being purely personal and typical. Here’s Continuation II (1990): “Austin Women’s Institute Library”/in Magog, a large brick building,/now being demolished/(Probably couldn’t pay their taxes)/Why not demolish some of the Chinese Restaurants,/HiFi Centres, Record Stores?/They demolish the library building,/no new ones going up, you may be sure,/to make room for Philco, Esso,/& Col. Sanders’ finger-lickin fries/The cross on Mount Royal no longer visible — high-risers stand in the way.”

 

Don’t hifi centres and record stores provide art and culture, just like libraries? Alright, maybe they sell it, like Dickens, which Dudek “proved” is a bad thing, but Shakespeare too sold art, and primarily to the masses, so does the profit motive really work against art? And what’s wrong with Chinese cafes? Pound’s particulars are carefully chosen, and add up to/illustrate generalizations about money and heroism. Dudek’s particulars add up to random or purely idiosyncratic lists of things that can be dismissed at will, to uncontextualized personal irritations. The assumption of intimacy in the direct reference to the reader as “you,” in the question asked, in the aside about taxes, and in the sarcastic (and slightly inaccurate) repetition of the Col. Sanders’ refrain, indicates that the reader is expected to agree with the sentiments voiced. No attempt is made to explain the value judgments made. The “they” who destroy libraries are undefined — “the system” presumably.

 

One meets embittered characters like Dudek everywhere — lecturing at McGill or eating donuts at Tim Hortons. They are comical in small doses. Mostly they are boring because they don’t invite response. The evidence for their vast generalizations is a scattered mish-mash of personal anecdotes and media information. At university this would be enriched by ideas and information gleaned from MacLean’s, Harper’s, CBC “Ideas” and drinking buddies at the Faculty Club.

 

Nor does Dudek propose answers, which could indicate context. The only proactive message of Dudek’s long poems is “experience the art listed here.” The poems are a catalogue of great architecture, painting, music and poetry, a kind of Arts I or “Civilization” reading list rather like Dudek’s courses at McGill. There is no dramatization of the kind of character you will become if you take this course. Presumably you will acquire Dudek’s concerns, regarding Col. Sanders, Chinese cafes, the sale of hot dogs around the Louvre or the obscuring of the cross on Mont Royal by hi-rise towers as symbols of the crass materialism of liberal democracy and capitalism. Nor is there any description of the new civilization that your improved self will help to build, of the methods you will use to build it. The single, specified alternative to being a “boob” is doing a doctorate and becoming a tenured prof with lots of sabbaticals wherein you can ponder great art — preferably on lengthy tours of the hot spots of western civilization. You will know that the new civilization — the time when all facets of society including the fine arts will make up the single, healthy organic unity that Pound wanted — actually existed in the past, and was based on a love of poetry rather than a fascist polity (Pound), a universal Christian faith (Eliot), the turning point in a millennial cycle (Yeats), or the reaffirmation of “ceremony of passage” rituals (Blaser). You will learn that the only present means of regaining civilization is to study the reading list and maybe to write poems criticizing the present for its failures — especially its failure, said by Dudek, Davey and Blaser to be the most insidious one of all, to pay attention to poetry. And poets. And professors of poetry.

 

VIII

Davey, Blaser and Tremblay see Dudek’s studies of and correspondence with Pound as productive, in that they produced an alternative, in terms of pragmatic action including the writing of poetry, to the absolutist visions of the great modernist poets. They see Dudek, in the course of these studies and this correspondence, as secure in his faith, incisive as to what of his master’s message he will accept and what he will not, learning from and looking after his master and thus, through his iconoclasm, leading the younger literati (like them) away from the absolutist tendencies of Yeats, Eliot and Pound into the “open-minded project” of post-modernism. Blaser says, “In Dudek’s annotated edition of Ezra Pound’s letters to him . . . the record is kept of Dudek’s personal efforts to argue for Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and of his part in the important fourth issue of CIV/n . . . which supported the case for release . . . . These Canadian arguments were capped by Dudek’s polished presentation of Pound by way of his letters on CBC, September 4, 1957, the complete text of which is included in Dk. After twelve years, Pound’s release was ordered on April 18, 1958. Dudek is one of the distinguished voices that helped bring it about.” Blaser goes on to say that, while bringing it about, Dudek had to block Pound’s plot to “enter the Canadian literary scene by way of the leading edge of its small presses and magazines, those of Dudek and associates foremost among them. Pound’s extremism in this period is simply and determinedly blocked by Dudek’s humanity and commitment to a very different ordering of the real. . . . Dudek writes, ‘my own views were leftist and strongly democratic’.” The “new ordering of the real” was conscience-based and connected to “coming of age.” According to Tremblay, “Dudek’s modernism was meant to open the field, not necessarily to dictate its terms.”

 

This is an unbelievably rosy view of Dudek’s relationship with Pound, which has been described by Fetherling as, quite simply, “sad.” It contradicts Dudek’s own late-in-life repudiation of Pound in which Dudek leaves John Tytell’s biography Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, “with sadness, as if I had seen the wreckage of my own past.” Dudek wasn’t committed to “a very different ordering of the real” but to a faith. That faith — that “by God today we mean Poetry” — failed. He actually appears in Dk as a useful yet unappreciated disciple who flunked all the crucial tests and turned off during the lessons he most needed. Because he refused to listen to Pound, because he made a virtue out of ignoring anything he felt was offensive (i.e. Mein Kampf), Dudek was led into complicity with Pound’s fascism, unable to pull back in time. He became a sorcerer’s apprentice, Mickey Mouse in a hat and gown too big for him, and a wand that he doesn’t know how to use. Dudek tried to apply the master’s incantations without fully understanding them. He thought he could defend his master publicly, release him from bondage, resolve complex social issues and fill empty literary cisterns by muttering abstract spells to the effect that Pound suffered from “surface mania,” fascism was an “ongoing experiment” and racist slurs were “radical self-criticism.” These assumptions blew up in his face. Dk is a comedy of errors, leading up to the Expo invitation, which could have been the biggest comedy of all.

 

The silliest mistake Dudek made was to try to spring Pound from the asylum. In 1953, in his magazine CIV/n, Dudek published snippets by Valentin Iremonger, and Donat O’Donnell (Conor Cruise O’Brien) and an article by Camillo Pellizzi arguing for Pound’s release. Dudek himself wrote an essay in that issue, vilifying American justice: “Pound has been incarcerated without legal grounds . . . . In hospital he has translated difficult prose and poetry into imperishable English, has edited and proofed his writings.. has carried on a voluminous, practical, benevolent correspondence ... Why should Pound, whose insanity is in fact questionable, be kept behind locked gates ... ? Let him be released from St. Elizabeths without further indignity and cruelty at the hands of the country he has always served in its best tradition of radical self-criticism.”

 

The main trouble with this argument was that, in the eyes of many, America had treated Pound with too much consideration. His plea of insanity was easily accepted and he was incarcerated in a place that his best friend Williams described as a perfect writer’s retreat. Williams, a man who had similar complaints against (but different explanations and cures for) civilization, said, “say what you will of the government, our own in particular in this case, it is permitting him, to the limit of his ability, to avail himself of the stores of knowledge found in the national capital.” He was also capable, as Dudek noted in his repudiation, of availing himself of a wife, a mistress, and a lot of fascist toadies.

 

Blaser praises Dudek for his “Canadian” argument. Taking “Canadian” here to mean “stupid,” Pound would’ve agreed. When he read the issue of CIV/n, Pound immediately wrote (in letter 58): “God bloody DAMN it and save one from one’s friends. SHUT UP. You are NOT supposed to receive ANY letters from E. P. They are UNSIGNED/and if one cannot trust one’s friends to keep quiet re/ the supposed source/whom can one trust. Please remove that page from all copies of Civ/n not yet distributed. Also, a little study of history wouldn’t do you any harm. Hell, hell, hell. When are you going to face the facts? the idiocy, etc. Who the HELL told YOU that E.P. has carried on correspondence?”

 

Dudek’s response to Pound’s anger is curiously obtuse: “As I see it now, Pound’s letter to me is more an index of his frustration in that terrible mental hospital than a question of any objective incident that might have provoked his anger. I wrote in reply to explain that it was in any case widely known that he had a very large correspondence and did translations and other writing from St. Liz: this was no news to anyone, and could do him no harm. Pound did not answer, and our correspondence, already lagging, lapsed for some time.” It did more than lapse. As Fetherling says, “the friendship cooled.”

 

No wonder. Dudek had proven himself dangerous. He had acted impulsively, without regard to the fact that, as Dudek himself says in his commentary, the chief psychiatrist at the asylum, Winfred Overholser, queried by Dudek about the continuing incarceration of a man who was obviously sane, referred Dudek to officials who explained the obvious — if Pound were to be declared sane, he would get out of St. Elisabeths alright. But he would go straight to jail to await trial on treason charges. A guilty verdict would mean execution or hard time in a real prison. It was a simple, two-way choice, and Pound had made it himself, deciding to live the lie of insanity and suffer the ensuing guilt of selling out his cause. It seems that Dudek simply couldn’t accept this: how can you worship a messiah who, on the way to the cross, discredits his message (which Dudek took to be all about art) by telling Pilate that he’s actually nuts and then goes on to pretend memory loss and distraction whenever reporters and officials come around? Pound’s other friends argued for his release on the grounds that he was irredeemably nuts but harmless. This is what Pound seems to have wanted, though some biographers argue that he didn’t even want that. As Williams observed, he was comfortable and productive at Saint Elizabeths. As an additional benefit, he could think of himself as a fascist martyr like his hero Mussolini. His “suffering” for the cause hid the fact that he had sold it out.

 

Later, in his repudiation of Pound, Dudek blames himself for not recognizing that Pound was happy at St. Elizabeths and was actually undermining attempts to spring him. It’s hard to see how Dudek could’ve missed this; it was obvious at the time to Eliot, MacLeish and Frost, who also realized that society was in one way better off with Pound incarcerated — they knew he would resume his neo-Nazi activities as soon as he was out, since he was conducting them covertly from inside. As Dudek says, everyone knew about his “voluminous” correspondence, though no one but Dudek and Pound’s fascist toadies would apply the word “benevolent” to it. Most conspicuously Pound was corresponding with John Kasper of Square Dollar Press and people like him who were acting to spread fascism and racism. But Eliot, MacLeish and Frost argued that it would make America look especially good if it put up with this and released Pound. He was insane and his cause had been discredited. Frost admitted that he made this argument in the hope that a liberated Pound would move into someone else’s neighborhood.

 

Dudek also, in his repudiation, implies that he recognizes for the first time, through Tytell’s book, that his attempt to spring Pound involved giving fascists a voice in CIV/n: “Goddamit. Olivia Rossetti Agresti, whose article on Pound we published . . . and who I was told was William Gabriel Rossetti’s daughter, and niece of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was actually one of the broadcasters on Rome radio, together with Ezra Pound — and so was Camillo Pellizzi who appears in CIV/n. . . .” But Dudek knew in 1974, when he produced the annotations for Pound’s letters, that Pellizzi was “officially connected with Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts,” and he was paraphrasing Pellizzi to Shapiro in 1951, two years before CIV/n. (Possibly Dudek panicked over nothing. It’s Carlo, not Camillo, Pellizzi who is mentioned by Tytell as “one of the overseers of Pound’s war propaganda.”)

 

Another blow-up occurred when Pound sent Dudek the main points of a letter to Karl Shapiro, editor of Poetry (Chicago), and asked Dudek to write it up in full and send it under his own name. The points were a guide — Dudek was only to use them if he agreed with them — though it would be preferable if he didn’t add to them. Dudek was not to mention to “ANYone” that Pound had given him the idea of sending the letter. The letter answered some of what Dudek calls “the slanders and misrepresentations” that had arisen out of Pound’s receiving of the Bollingen Award — America’s top poetry prize. The award was a clear sign to the American public and the media that Pound was a sane man and could stand trial. The government reacted to the furor by allowing the award — which included a substantial amount of money that went to Pound’s wife — to stand but prohibiting the Library of Congress from offering any further awards — the prize was henceforth administered by Yale University. Dudek was intimidated by the public outcry. He assumed that Pound meant him to parrot the letter and rightfully decided he “could not play Charlie McCarthy . . . . But he had to appease Pound so he came up with another plan: “Instead I wrote a short article, using as much of Pound’s material as I could manage, and sent it in. The letter was turned down by Karl Shapiro, naturally enough.” Dudek doesn’t quote his “short article” in Dk, but he sent a copy to Pound so it turned up in the Pound archives, and part of it has been quoted by Tremblay. Dudek wrote to Shapiro, “Italian Fascists under Mussolini comprised all sorts, as Pellizzi shows in his recent book Una Rivoluzione mancata, and the aim of the movement was something tentative and always in the process of adjustment.”

 

Pound was not pleased: “Shapiro is right, I think, yr/article is/USELESS. Yu went outside request/AND you are almost as ham ignorant/of Europe as Shapiro/you haven’t bothered to learn ENOUGH/ SO far as I can make out, what my/position was/what my econ/or politics are.” Dudek wrote back, again obviously hurt: “I had reduced it to a few generalities . . . of a kind which I have so far been able to assimilate myself for my own USE, maybe useful for somebody else (ain’t that what one does with any writer??), but knowing also that these generalities could not altogether please the original author, meaning yourself.” It’s hard to say here if Dudek understood that his generalities were of no “use” except as evasion, something Pound didn’t go for when it came to his platform, anymore than he went for it in his poetry.

 

Dudek says it was “natural” that Shapiro rejected his letter — was he alluding to the fact that Shapiro was on the Bollingen committee and had voted for William Carlos Williams, and so wouldn’t be inclined to print any defenses of Pound? Or was Dudek alluding to the fact that his own description of Mussolini’s aims, put as a summary of Pellizzi’s argument, is a disgusting attempt to put a positive spin on a political platform that enforced itself on Italy with extreme brutality that included the summary execution of labor and socialist leaders? For a second time Dudek implicated himself. First he’d vilified American justice. Now he was extolling Mussolini.

 

From Pound’s perspective, Dudek did only one thing right — the 1957 CBC broadcast “The Letters of Ezra Pound.” It concentrates on Pound’s early career as a literary mover and shaker in London and Paris, with his critiques of his modernist colleagues, and with his work as Eliot’s editor and confidante. It praises the Cantos and fairly convincingly defends their “Social Credit” content. It is marred only by the obvious falsification that Pound’s Radio Rome broadcasts dealt largely with poetry and the contents of the Cantos. On the basis of this, it argues that his incarceration is “the tragic case in our time of the genius misunderstood and persecuted by his contemporaries.” The broadcast served Pound’s “propaganda machine” well, and Pound was grateful. Blaser praises it highly. But its conclusion doesn’t reflect well on Dudek. Once again he is slagging a justice system that seems to be erring on the side of mercy and he is either lying or uninformed about the broadcasts.

 

Both Pound and Dudek were liars. Both lied in their choice of particulars, but Dudek could lie too in his generalizations. He was a compulsive rationalizer.

 

IX

By 1974, when he published Dk, Dudek had become aware of some of the foolishness and complicity in his correspondence with Pound. Dudek tried to make himself look a bit smarter. First, he argued that Pound was insane (in his insistence on particulars and obsession with arcane subjects like Social Credit) but not really insane: “I believe that his narrow dogmatism was a product of his mental illness; but this illness, though devastating and tragic for him, did not penetrate very deep, it was a surface mania.” He further reasoned that a surface mania would not affect Pound’s poetry but maybe even strengthen it: “Mental illness . . . does not cut a man off from poetry. It may even release greater powers, of insight, of verbal surprise, of emotional force, than are possible to the lukewarm states of sane repose. Perhaps the truly alienated cannot enjoy this benefit. Perhaps it is only available to the partially or minimally ill, who fight their illness. I don’t think we can deny that Pound was one of these.”

 

By convincing himself that Pound was insane only “on the surface,” Dudek was able to have it both ways. Pound was a genius, though his ideas were crazy. However, this rationalization came at some cost, since it represents a shift in Dudek’s faith. Dudek was moving towards Frye’s idea of the poet evoking sources of inspiration that are outside of rational consciousness, and contradicting what he considered to be the source of his own strength as a poet, his sense of what was thematically important and his familiarity with direct or natural forms of expression. He already knew that Pound’s strength was in his insistence on “the thing itself,” and he’d attached himself to that cause. Now he was saying that this insistence was a mania. Pound was “theoretically unable to understand [that things came with ideas], with benefit to him, since his poetry as a result is crammed with vivid particulars, or ideograms, but every line nevertheless resonates with the abstract or general meaning of these particulars.” Layton might not have feuded with Dudek had he realized that he could’ve meant “demented” as a compliment.

 

Besides arguing that Pound was insane in his obsession with particulars, Dudek managed the commentary in Dk in order to obscure the full extent of his compliance with Pound’s “agenda.” The extent to which he did this is unknown, and will only be revealed when Dudek’s letters to Pound are published, but quotations from these letters show how Dudek worked. These letters are evidently available now from Philip Kokotailo who, in the mid-1990’s, collected them from Pound archives at various US universities. Kokotailo has discussed these letters with Dudek who allowed their use but not, it seems, their publication. That Kokotailo hasn’t published them yet suggests too that Dudek’s estate is against publication. Their concerns would arise from the fact that the letters reveal more complicity with Pound’s agenda, less non-compliance, more misrepresentation, than the commentary in Dk makes out.

 

Tremblay has used Kokotailo’s manuscript, quoting from Dudek’s unpublished letters to indicate how Dudek downplayed his reverence for Pound. In 1949, Dudek came onto Pound with lavish praise: “your poetry is the best living experience in books that I know; it sometimes (now) has made me blind ... When I’m really tired in mind and body, I take your Cantos... and lie back on a cushion and read and read till I’m happy.” Anyone familiar with Dudek would understand that this praise was sincere, but obviously by 1974 Dudek was worried that readers would get the impression that he was “sucking up” to Pound. Maybe he was even a touch embarrassed by his own enthusiasm. As Tremblay notes, all Dudek says in Dk is, “I had written in praise of the Cantos.”

 

But Tremblay’s quotes indicate that Dudek went far beyond playing down his reverence for Pound. He actually misrepresented himself. His praise of the Cantos, he says in Dk, noted “that part of the excitement lay in discovering the historical references and making correlations... and all this would be spoiled for the reader once the scholars and annotators had provided the footnotes and analysis that would explain the poem.” What he really said was “the colleges are crammed with experts and scholars who don’t know how to take poetry, who want to understand it first in some footnoting farcical grade-school sense. I hope to god they never understand it. Unless a poem shines for the eyes and crackles in the ears before it is understood, it isn’t worth understanding.” Why would Dudek bring this up, as a grad student obviously committed to an academic career and writing a heavily footnoted account of three Victorian writers? Or as a critic who seldom discussed the ways in which poems shone in the eyes and crackled in the ears (this was the preserve of the New Critics), but near-exclusively the ways in which they appealed to the mind? Probably he was aware of Pound’s animosity to academics and careful to come onto Pound as a novice poet and not as an academic. It worked, for awhile. Pound provided the answer that Dudek must have been hoping for: “Don’t worry, they wont./i.e. profs &analyzers.” Dudek acknowledges that he regularly ranted at Pound about academics, even after he took a job and McGill. But Pound was not fooled, later informing Dudek, “You profs have a lot to answer for ...”

 

As a further example of misrepresentation, Dudek in his second letter bravely brings up the matter of usury, saying he thinks it characterizes Anglo-Saxon societies more than Jewish ones. The commentary on this leaves out the fact that Dudek makes it clear that he had no intention of judging Pound on this or any other issue. Dudek actually says in his letter, “I have too much to answer for myself to dare to say that a man like you is guilty of a moral wrong...your detractors...give you the label of anti-Semite and Fascist without enquiring what you say about those things in your books.” Pound agrees with the comment about usury, but states, “a cat is neither a dog nor a rabbit/neither does one want a cat to be doggy nor vice versa.” In short, races of humans are as different as different species of animals. He makes no reference to Dudek’s claim to be morally compromised. Since Dudek lists no particular moral wrongs, what could Pound have said? Dudek’s message was clear — he doesn’t really believe that Pound is a Fascist or anti-Semite. He is willing to listen even if he is.

 

In December 1950, Dudek sent another important message to Pound — a message unmentioned in the Dk commentary. He made it clear that in his opinion fascism, while it had the highest of goals, had failed, and that it had failed because it was undemocratic. He describes the “function of Fascism — to end categorically the fixed & formal strife between employer and employed, dating from the birth of the Factory system — to devote the energy of all to the communal good, and make the higher end their arbiter.” All of this is “impossible under democracy,” as one can see “in the faces of subway riders... in the faces of haranguing demagogues in our recent elections, racketeering and bamboozling the crowd for votes, not for policies... impossible because a small group who understand the big idea are a drop in the bucket in this mass society... So where do we go from here? Into the Cantos. I am with you, Ezra.... For some of us there is no complete political action possible, but you do recommend a line of thinking. That is what one wants to find and follow. Not to imitate: but to do a different dance on the same tight wire.”

 

Dudek is telling Pound, up front, that he’s not going to do anything for fascism even if he agrees that fascism had the highest goals. But he is going to follow Pound’s “line of thinking” — “follow” meaning “study” not “imitate.” His reasoning is that fascism failed because it was undemocratic, and there is no use trying to apply democracy to fascism because democracy doesn’t work. Pound would naturally be puzzled by the reasoning, which brings all thought about politics as well as any political action to an impasse. Why study, never mind imitate, a “line of thinking,” that you know leads nowhere? The big picture is seen only by a few (an intellectual elite?) and they somehow have no power.

 

Pound wouldn’t have considered Dudek part of the “small group who understand.” Obviously Dudek was a rationalizer. But he responds positively by recommending that Dudek study the different parties within the fascist party in Italy, mentioning Camillo Pellizzi, as a man who “keeps afloat by taking it all to general philo, well let us say philoepistemological statement.” Dudek comments, “I did not feel that the occasion warranted my writing to Signor Pellizzi.” This sarcasm seems out of place. Pound was being thoughtful here, taking into account Dudek’s generalizing bent. Pound had already put Pellizzi on a list of writers who could explain fascism, but did not particularly recommend him: “all people like that do is to explain their own thoughts, VERY little to do with what actually happened/which was GODDAMIT the best a blacksmith’s son [Mussolini] could do under the circumstances.” But after Dudek’s clear statement about there not being any complete political action possible, Pound seems to have decided that Pellizzi would appeal to Dudek: “Dudek nearer temperamentally to Pel/than Ez iz.” Dudek and Pellizzi are into generalizations based only on personal opinion, but Pound is willing to consider that such generalizations can keep some fascists afloat through a time of defeat.

 

Until Dudek’s letters are made public, Pound’s letters, taken without the commentary, indicate the basis on which the relationship developed. Right away, Pound identified Dudek as a generalizer. Pound of course had preconceived notions, as did Dudek, but Dudek thought it helped an argument to state these notions in abstract terms, whereas Pound believed that there was no conviction to be gained through abstractions. He considered himself “scientific” in his thinking, and in science the abstractions of geometry and mathematics, applied in reductionist experiments to particulars, carry absolute conviction. As Dudek and many others noticed, the particulars collected by Pound (and a reluctant Dudek) in support of his beliefs were arcane if not stupid. But once in awhile Pound came up with ones that, in his poetry, “resonate with general meanings.” Dudek thought his “mania” helped him do this. Dudek himself, locked in “sane repose,” specialized in clear, forceful and direct expression of abstractions, without much explanation of how those meanings were arrived at and without any recommending of actions, except for the reading of poems, that might test the abstractions. Pound on his part realized that Dudek would never do anything, including write a poem. Dudek was excluding himself from the principles of Imagism that Pound had laid out and that had become the basis of the modernist correction of the bourgeois poetry of the Romantics and Victorians.

 

Pound’s draft letter to Shapiro, for example, is stated in particulars (mixed with vituperation). The Partisan Review and some California magazines, all of which had to be “communist,” were attacking Pound. Pound had lost the California magazines from his file; Dudek in his annotations doesn’t list titles for them. But Dudek identifies F. R. Leavis’s “Ezra Pound: The Promise and the Disaster,” as the article in Partisan. The impression is given in these articles that Pound has racist attitudes to Jews and blacks. Pound wants Dudek to refer Shapiro to the references to “men of colour” in the Pisan Cantos. As well, Pound indicates that his championing of Arnaut Daniel (everywhere in his works) indicates that he is “pro-Semite.” Pound is trying to defend himself in the only way he would find legitimate/effective — here’s a list of my actions that indicate I am not a racist or an anti-Semite. He’s being selective in the extreme, but he’s being particular. Pound makes it clear that he doesn’t want Dudek publishing a generalizing defense, that he could do that in Canada where evidently you can get away with it: “If you want a dilution or expansion try THAT on Can/Mag BUT the point was to have those few sentences in the known and circulating bullyTin SOON.” Unfortunately, Dudek ignored all this and tried, as he explained in a letter to Pound, to produce “useful generalizations.” In Pound’s view, that phrase would be an oxymoron. The only “use” for a generalization was as an evasion.

 

X

Olson would have none of the inclination to call Pound a maniac: “You and I know that Pound is not crazy, one of those “poets.” You and I know he is a gifted and trained and skillful a poet as any man who has written the English language in these years of our century. We may find him exterior. But there is none but the small who will deny him his power.... He is no poet to separate his poetry from society. He is a writer of purpose. . . do you call him a crank? It is no good, that business. Around his trial you will hear it again and again. Just one of those goddamned writers. They’re crazy. A Bohemian. There are writers who are such, but not Pound, despite all the vomit of his conclusions.”

 

Pound does seem directed and consistent in his dealings with Dudek. He tried to make Dudek think — in Pound’s own terms. Dudek had come onto him as at least objective, probably sympathetic, so he tended to assume that Dudek would come to the same conclusions he had. Actually, he seems to have assumed this of everyone, being convinced that he could talk Stalin, Hitler and assorted American politicians into seeing his point, always puzzled that obviously thoughtful and supremely rational individuals — Williams was the great example — could not be convinced. But he never tried to force fascism on Dudek. He argued with Dudek entirely about method. He gave Dudek the lessons laid out in his ABC of Reading (1934, 1960). The main lesson is that of Chapter One of ABC — a discourse on scientific methodology and its application to poetry, written in considerable impatience with people who don’t know how to think: “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is a careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another. . . . On this method modern science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of medieval logic suspended in a vacuum. . . . By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry.’”

 

Of course Pound is to science what Billy Graham and the Dali Lama are to theology, and Dudek recognized that. But he failed to see that his own way of thinking was flawed. Pound suggested that Dudek read Mein Kampf: “it will prob/alter the pt/of view of anyone who has swallowed even 10% of the perfumed sewage that flows thru [here Pound deletes a word] Digest...” Since Dudek had asked Pound for books on fascism, this suggestion doesn’t seem out of context. Dudek comments that he couldn’t stomach Hitler’s book: “My aversion to this book when I leafed through it was so intense - and the stench so pungent — that I have never been able to pick it up since. I can’t understand Pound’s reading it with even qualified approval.” To an inductive thinker it would seem that Dudek is protesting too much. If he’s never read the book, how would he know what Pound might find in it to approve? Is Dudek afraid that he would be turned into a Nazi by reading Hitler? What would Dudek say to a student who refused to read Dante because he was Catholic, deSade because he was a pervert or Dylan Thomas because he was an alcoholic? Dudek’s reaction is that of a person of conscience who cannot see anything to be gained by studying the works of an obviously evil person. In a similar way he could toss off Purdy — reading him alright, and even being impressed, but dismissing his particulars of Inuit life, of the agrarian past, as “not important.”

 

What Pound was saying to Dudek was something like this: You share with me faith and cause, of which you see my writing as the great embodiment. You express a desire to assist me in this cause. You share with me the most violent distaste for the present situation. This distaste is in all your talk and your poetry, as it is in mine. You see and describe western civilization as a wasteland and a miasma, and your contemporaries as reduced to automatons by complex technology and its applications. Your thesis describes the miseries of Dickens, Thackeray and Carlyle, great artists diminished or obstructed by highly capitalized mass production technology that was out of their control and operating in the interests of profit. Yet you don’t seem to see that this drastic talk, this sweeping condemnation, these massive abstractions, mandate extensive study accompanied by ongoing and drastic action, both in your poetry and your life, if they are to be presented in poetry. It is not enough to assert in general terms the impossibility of a good polity and poetics, since people must live together and express themselves in poetry. In the terms that you have stated your complaints — economic, sociological and political terms — you have to explain what you think is going on. Probably too you should act on it as I did, since you write as I do at times in first-person. Lacking such study and action, you can produce only what you’ve shown me — the ruminations of a professor on vacation. Obviously, considering the problems you have posed, this is laughable.

 

Olson recognized this challenge. In his notebooks, he called upon the great modernist writers, who owed Pound so much, who learned from him, who were his equals, to put Pound on trial, to explain him: “I cannot be responsible for the way the Dept. of Justice tries the citizen Ezra Pound. But I say I nor any other writer can allow Ezra Pound the writer to go unjudged. It is here the fact that he is a poet, and a good one, has bearing.... I propose that what has not been done since his indictment be now done because his public trial is a trial of all of us who use the word. This man, who is as good as any of us, is a fascist.... It is not as a traitor to the U.S., but as a fascist he should be judged. It is not his radio broadcasts but the whole body of his work that should be the testimony. . . . Such a trial is long overdue.... for it is already clear that though he shall be tried in court as... a mere hired hand of a foreign government with whom we were at war, we shall find that the press and the people will try him as the Poet Ezra Pound.... Let us, then, in the world of our value, separate from the state, examine the work of Pound. He would be the first to stake his work as social in consequence. What is called for is a consideration, based on his career, of how such a man came to the position he reached when he allowed himself to become the voice of Fascism. For Pound is not isolated in this, among artists of his time. He is only, as so often, the more extreme. Yeats, Lewis, Lawrence have also been labeled fascist.... I wonder why T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, other men who have known Pound all these years have not told us how they explain him. They knew him better than we younger men. I am fed up with the easy.”

 

It is easy to, as Dudek did, slag liberal democratic society when you fail to track the sources of its failings and specify no alternatives as the great modernists tried to do. Dudek failed to take up the challenge Pound represented — to, as Olson put it, figure out how a great poet had gravitated to the cult of the elite. Failing to do this, he put himself in danger. Since his poetry was one long complaint about the liberal-democratic, capitalistic society he lived in, a complaint illustrated only by disconnected personal particulars and serious vituperation, Dudek could only be taken as a whiner or a fascist. Fortunately he found no readers. Fortunately those who did read him, mostly his colleagues, many of whom had the same condescending attitude to the masses, took him as a whiner.

 

Some of his students saw him as a fascist, but a relatively harmless one in that he limited his actual political activities to the campus and to the hounding of their heroes Leonard Cohen and Marshall McLuhan. In October 1968, Yetta Wainwright, BA 3, placed the following note of protest in the McGill Daily: “In your issue of October 9, one Louis Dudek delivers one of his periodic polemics against the creeping Marxist menace. Having taken more than one of Dudek’s courses, I’m used to his particular brand of paranoiac idiocy. Anyone who still buys Dudek’s image as some kind of good, grey poet should attend a few of his classes and find out what a tedious old turkey he really is. If the defendants of ‘democracy’ (in the Dudek sense) want their case articulated, they should file Dudek and fly in Max Rafferty [campus hippie-basher and Republican candidate for Senate]....” Other students were a bit more understanding than Wainwright, noting that Dudek, unlike most of the other good, grey poets on campuses across the country, at least cared enough about what was going on to respond.

 

XI

Dudek’s correspondence with Pound ended with the Expo invitation. Pound died five years later in 1972 and for another decade Dudek continued to proselytize and apologize for Pound and the Cantos, using the arguments presented in Dk. Then, in the mid-1980’s, two books shook Dudek’s confidence. E. Torrey’s book The Roots of Treason (1983) — a book based on St Elizabeth hospital files released under the American Freedom of Information law — conveyed to Dudek the “horrifying realization that Pound’s anti-Semitism and racism were far more virulent and deeply rooted than I had ever allowed for.” But Dudek mentions in his Globe and Mail review of the book that Pound did deny his anti-Semitism and “meant it when he said it, just as he meant his anti-Semitic rants on Italian radio and elsewhere.” For Dudek this confirmed that Pound was crazy, not sane as Torrey (a psychiatrist) asserts. But Dudek is quick to push his old argument that Pound’s craziness is only one side of his personality. The other side looked after Eliot and Joyce, got them and Frost and Hemingway published, wrote the Cantos which are free of anti-Semitism and even of fascism.

 

A year later (1984), a review of The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis shows Dudek again disturbed but still defending Pound. Here he says that the letters show that Pound was shocked into craziness by the changes in civilization since the First World War. But he remained a poet “to the bottom of his messianic, somewhat demented soul:” “His language started to change — it’s visible in these letters — and this change, coming out of “his rage and sense of mission,” should be studied, rather than Pound’s biography. In fact, says Dudek, “more books that reveal the nasty side of Pound’s personality — his anti-Semitic cracks, his glorification of Mussolini’s ‘empire,’ his attempt to sign his initials with a swastika ‘in order to rile the Americans’ — all that, for the sake of his poetry, I would now be willing to do without.” This was in line with Dudek’s overall tendency to ignore things about Pound that offended him, and it indicates the shakiness of his faith in the prophet. Unfortunately, Dudek himself never followed up his idea of studying how Pound’s language changed due to his rage and sense of mission. That would have been a valuable study, pertinent to Pound’s skill with particulars and Dudek’s own struggle with style. Pound would have approved. But of course such a study would require analysis of particulars. Dudek would have to dabble in the New Criticism.

 

But it seems Dudek was as good as his word in ignoring further publications of Pound’s non-literary writings and further biographies of Pound. In 1987 another biography of Pound appeared, John Tytell’s Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. Evidently, Dudek didn’t read it until 1994, when it sparked his repudiation of Pound. The repudiation was published as notes on Tytell in Poetry Canada Review. Dudek says of these notes: “My comments were written down slowly, as I read, without any intention to make use of them or to publish. It was only when I had finished that it occurred to me they might make an interesting cross-section... showing my own present stage of thinking about this poet.”

 

There are two things wrong with this. First, despite Dudek’s determination to hear no evil about Pound, it would’ve been hard for Dudek to ignore a major book about his hero — a book that would have been read by so many and that, as it turned out, contained information pertinent to CIV/n 4 and 6. Second, the repudiation of Pound, the end of Dudek’s long agony of faith, is too violent — too absolute and all-inclusive. Pound was suddenly “a dangerous idiot” and a “stupid” man who had written a mostly lousy epic but just happened to be in the right place to ride the “tidal wave” of modernism to prominence. His shortcomings are illustrated in his personal life, his treatment of his wife and kids. His fame was “not his doing at all but the inevitable result of the triumph of modernism.” This triumph was engineered, Dudek now decided, mostly by Whitman, Williams and Eliot. Dudek refers to the “utter confusion and lack of meaning in the Cantos... only the Pisan Cantos come through as poetry. The rest is pedantry and ego pressure and striving for achievement.” Dudek reveals that his decades-long admiration for the Cantos — his imitations of them, his complex attempts to explain how the poem was written by a man whose grip on reason was “basically” solid — had no aesthetic underpinning and was based only on the false idea that the poem had some meaning. He reveals that you can follow all the precepts of modernist poetry and still (like Dudek) write crappy poems that people attached to modernism (like Dudek) will regard as works of genius.

 

Pound had become a bundle of particulars that could only be denied if the faith he once represented was to live on. That denial had to be clear and absolute; the Gordian knot that tied Dudek to Pound had to be cut. Adding to Dudek’s desperation, perhaps, was his sense of changes in the literary winds. The fact that Blaser went to such extreme lengths to sanitize him in regards to Pound, to authority and to elitism could have been in itself threatening. Post-modernism, led by Derrida, was entering its self-purifying phase — a phase characteristic of all faiths. Advocates were banished for failing to split the right hair. Can you quote from Derrida, when that quote establishes him as an authority, and authority is bad? Can you produce anthologies promoting a canon of black, Indian, women’s etc writing when canons are bad? Can you apply post-modernist methodology, which avoids reductionist logic and canonized history and applies a “culturalist” orientation, to justify an ideology that promoted anti-Semitism, engaged in a brutal, expansionist war in Africa and ended up worshipping every word of the duce, an obvious emotional cripple?

 

Maybe Dudek recognized his vulnerability, future scholars writing or reading crucifying studies of Pound pointing at him and saying “This man was with him.”

 

XII

Dudek’s repudiation left the post-modernists in the lurch. Tremblay expresses puzzlement at its violence. “What are we to make of it?” he asks. Hadn’t Davey and Blaser affirmed that Dudek had learned Pound’s lessons on Imagism and on that basis risen to become as great a poet? Also Dudek, says Tremblay, like Pound, “worked publicly to put his ideas into action, modeling, in the process, what both poets thought to be the highest of civic values... a program of social action through the arts.” In this, Dudek was the “more successful cultural worker.” Ultimately, Dudek produced “a functional Canadian criticism that was far more nationally inclusive than Pound’s rather narcissistic and republican view of cultural production.” Still, “he was working to produce the kind of culture that he and Pound envisioned.” To reject Pound outright was to reject the foundation of all Dudek’s accomplishments. For Davey and Tremblay, Dudek rejected Pound in the way a good student rejects a good teacher, by improving on him. His 1994 repudiation was specious.

 

Blaser has the same praise of Dudek, but his argument is of Jesuitical sublety. It seems that it had to be. There’s no way that Blaser, who has some talent and presence as a poet, and who was an expert on Pound, directing graduate theses on him at SFU, could’ve believed that Dudek’s poetry is better than Pound’s or in any significant way even remotely equal to it. There’s no way either that he could’ve done so strictly out of loyalty to post-modernism, which he valued in moderation as a method but famously characterized to his students as modernism laid on its back and wearing bangles and eye makeup. He used the epithet “fat fag” to describe post-modernists. His unexplained but constant references in his preface to the “Canadian” nature of Dudek’s opening up of modernism hints at some insecurity about his situation as an American, but at the same time Blaser was in no way hesitant on arrival at SFU to take out Canadian citizenship (Brian Fawcett sponsored him). He was eager to involve himself in Canlit, which may be why he took on the editing of Dudek. He may have felt insecure as a prof, lacking a doctorate, and wanted a serious project, though his poetry was well regarded in Canada, entering the anthologies at the time that Dudek’s was being ushered out.

 

Whatever the reasons for his virtuoso performance, it comes across as insincere but revealing. Blaser does allow the reader to assume that Dudek is a major poet since Dudek’s is “an important voice” in countering Pound’s “move toward a totalitarian vision which is a characteristic of modernism now under necessary and severe correction.” This must be a reference to the poetry of both men, since neither man has much significance in any other context, and Dudek’s “voice” is still assumed to be primarily that of a poet. Also, Blaser’s words introduce a selection of Dudek’s poems and the implication is that Blaser has chosen these because he thinks they are good and indicate the important “correction” that Dudek represents.

Blaser, as Sutherland says, lays on the superlatives — but when these superlatives are looked at closely, most of them are evasive. Saying that Dudek’s long poems are “extraordinary,” and “strangely moving” could mean anything as to their aesthetic value. Even saying that En Mexico is “a marvel of detail, image and rhythm” could mean that the poem is marvelously bad in all these ways. Remarking that Dudek is “Canada’s most important — that is to say, consequential — modern voice” means nothing. The statement that Dudek has more in common with Dryden, Pope and Byron than most moderns could mean anything since there are vast tracts of boring, prosaic verse in all three of these older writers and this could be what Dudek has in common with them. Still, Continuation is referred to as a “great meditative poem,” the elegy to Williams is said to be “beautiful,” and Blaser says of Dudek, “the practice of his poetry, which fascinates from the first poems to the latest, has led him into a flowing, radiant form.” These seem to be unevasive superlatives.

 

Blaser further affirms that Dudek’s poetry is equal in “intellectual force” to the “intellectual energies of Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and George Whalley.” Comparing “intellectual force” in poetry to “intellectual energy” in expository prose is to see double, and Blaser has to deal with the massive disagreement that Dudek had with Frye and McLuhan and with the fact that Grant’s critique of modern civilization is an elegiac retreat, a paean to a defeat that Dudek would not admit is utter and would in any case regard as deserved by the contingent of proper bastards that ran the country for so long. Dudek was attracted to the mainstream but regarded it as a European rather than British phenomenon. Mainly, Blaser emphasizes an agreement he sees between Dudek and Frye, saying that Dudek would agree with Frye’s statement: “No discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the participation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of a complete and classless civilization.”

 

It seems Dudek would agree with this. As a socialist and supporter of democracy as a political system at least, Dudek would’ve liked the “classless” and as a literalist he would have liked the “complete.” But in what way can “the vision of the goal” be an “idea?” Blaser doesn’t explain, but he finds Dudek “an excellent guide through the sources of barbarism — the consumerism that claims reality by ownership; an anthropocentric view that closes into itself meaninglessly; the continuing, political postponement of a true commitment to social justice; the way poetry disappears in public thought. The poems reflect these problems many times over.” These are facets of Dudek’s and the post-modernists’ critique of contemporary liberal-democratic/capitalist civilization. Blaser recognizes that a critique can’t in itself convey a positive alternative like the idea of a complete and classless civilization, so he also notes the positives in Dudek. These are “his insistence that knowledge of the past be tied intelligently to the present, his use of an approachable language to support his care for the quality of ordinary life, his enveloping devotion to social justice and the civilization that could be based on it.” The implication is that Dudek shows readers how the past can be tied intelligently to the present, what quality of life is, and what a civilization based on social justice would look like.

But then Blaser immediately pulls back, admitting that Dudek’s insistence about tying past to present could be taken as elitist: “He is persistently democratic, though this is not always understood because his determined sense that a knowledge of the past civilizes the present has brought with it charges of elitism. Most of those who use that term should drop it. They are unwitting levelers who leave cultural consciousness ever more vulnerable to the on-going substitution of commercialization and mercantilism for a shared reality.” Blaser’s testy denial of Dudek’s elitism contradicts Davey’s cheerful acceptance of it, but it adds another revelation. For the post-modernists there is a “shared reality” that is being replaced by commercialization. Dudek understood what this reality was, and stood up for it.

 

Our shared reality is, it seems, some kind of human conscience that tells us what social justice and quality of life are. Not much more can be said about it, because Blaser thinks that actually specifying what social justice and quality of life are, actually laying out what the ideal civilization would be like, would be authoritarian — would be to do what Pound, Eliot and Yeats were trying to do, speak in particulars about the world they wanted. Dudek, Blaser says, understood that this could not be done. He quotes Dudek saying, “Our problem is the radical absence of any valid grounds for universality.” That is, Dudek and his fellow poets feel they know but know they can’t explain what intelligence, quality of life and social justice actually are. Consequently they decline to provide any explanation. Blaser modifies a quote from Lyotard to justify this seemingly defeatist and even cowardly attitude: “Dudek denies the totalitarian answers of modernism, knowing that they participate in the terror of our time. I think he would agree that it is ‘not our business to supply reality’ [Lyotard] — certainly not in totality.”

 

This leaves the poet only one recourse in participating in the idea of a complete and classless civilization — the one that Dudek tended, as all his critics point out, to take — abstraction. For most critics, this is the central problem of Dudek’s poetry, but for the post-modernists it is a strength. Tremblay says,”[his] attachment to imagistic clarity Dudek would outgrow, later embracing abstraction as a key poetic principle.” This opens the question of whether or not there can be a poetry of abstractions, a poetry that declines “to give to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.” Dudek and the other poet-Generalists, along with the postmodernist profs, might want to think so, but they are going against all classical, romantic and modernist poetics. Keats wanted axioms, but they had to be “felt along the pulse.” The modernists argue, “no ideas but in things.” Post-modernism, with its concept of abstraction as a poetic principle, is not so much a correction of modernism as Blaser says, but its opposite. It may be the opposite of what traditional theorists have always called imagination.

 

In this opposition, though, post-modernism still, in sticking to abstractions, doesn’t avoid the modernist tendency to absolutism. The aspirations of post-modernism, and its critique of liberal democracy, are those of fascism. David D. Roberts of the University of Georgia History Department says that post-modernists “find at work in Italian fascism not a fully elaborated ideology but a looser mix of ideas that articulated and helped to shape aspirations even as they offered no systematic blueprint.” This is exactly what the post-modernists see in Dudek and more or less what Dudek, in his letter to Shapiro, saw in fascism. And they seem as unaware as Dudek was that the difference between shaping aspirations and offering a blueprint is purely semantic. A loose mix of ideals becomes a polity or it doesn’t exist in the communal mentality: it is simply not there, not an “aspiration.”

 

There’s no way that Dudek, Blaser and Davey could be called fascists. They had no sympathy with fascism as a movement, and they expressed — especially when writing about Pound — their loyalty to democracy. Mainly, because they proposed nothing by way of polity, they can’t be attached in any meaningful or convincing way to either fascism or democracy. However, since their criticism of “civilization” is focused mainly on democracy, and is visceral rather than reasonable, they are especially distanced from democracy. Also, when they do get into analysis of why fascism crashed, they tend to blame the crash on the opposition that came from the democracies. This is because, as puritans, as fundamentalists, they hate the thinking that gave rise to the modern (and classical) democracies. They think like fascists. Their arguments are based, like Pound’s and Dudek’s, on the premise that their thinking is communal so that they can tell the masses how to think and feel. The fact that they have found their way into the universities, that their thinking is evidently valued enough to place them in the position of moral tutors to the new generation, is confirmation of sanctity. But it is their confidence in their private virtue that is the real confirmation. Some of them (not Blaser nor Davey) even claim independent authority to determine what texts are fit to preach from. What saves them from being fascists is their refusal to discuss polity except in the negative sense of attacking the structures and policies of liberal democracy.

In other words they perform the function that Pound valued in Pellizzi and thought to lay on Dudek — keeping fascism alive in the face of the victory of liberal democracy and the triumphalist liberal “I told you so” arguments that ensued. As Olson said when he argued for poets to engage in their own trial of Pound, “Fascism captured criticism of democracy and puts any critic in the camp of the enemy. It is time we faced this.”

 

Dudek didn’t face it in time to save his poetry or his peace of mind. He ended up where Eliot, one of the more obnoxious of the anti-Semitic and Mussolini-inclined modernists, finally, in Four Quartets, placed himself and Pound. First Eliot states their overall purpose: “Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us/To purify the dialect of the tribe/And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.” This might be a Statement of Purpose for the English Department. Then Eliot specifies what the “gifts” for this “concern” were going to be, “To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.” The joke is that these rewards are pretty much distributed to anyone in any walk of life. The first is old age, “as body and soul begin to fall asunder.” The second, maybe, goes especially to reflective types: “the conscious impotence of rage/At human folly, and the laceration/Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.” The last goes especially to those who have espoused a cause: “And last, the rending pain of re-enactment/Of all that you have done, and been; the shame/Of motives late revealed, and the awareness/Of things ill done and done to others’ harm/Which once you took for exercise of virtue./Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.”

 

Dudek got, in particular, gift 3, and he seems to have taken it hard. Unlike Eliot and Pound, he didn’t have anything in the way of convincing poetry to show for his crusade against science, mass culture and democracy and his worship of art. The approval of the post-modernists, and the medals hung on him by the English Department, don’t seem to have counted for much.

 

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Harris, John. "Sermon on the Mont: Louis Dudek’s Post-Modernist Cantos (I-VI)". Rpt. dooney'scafe.com February 16, 2008