Poundian Ethics

In his 1937 essay "THE JEFFERSON-ADAMS LETTERS," Ezra Pound clarifies a fundamental part of his worldview in an uncharacteristically direct way:

A Mediterranean state of mind, state of intelligence, modus of order 'arose' out of Sparta perhaps more than from Athens, it developed a system of graduations, an hierarchy of values among which was, perhaps above all other, 'order' ... its clearest formulation (along my line of measurement) is Dante's 'in una parte piu e meno altrove.' Which detached phrase I had best translate by explaining it to mean a sense of gradations.

He then goes on to contrast this "sense of gradations," discovered by the ancients and preserved through the following centuries, with a more vulgar system:

All I want to do for the moment is to set up two poles of reference. One: a graduated system in which all actions were relative good or evil, according to almost millimetric measurement, but in the absolute. Two, a system in which everything was good or bad without any graduation, but as taboo, though the system itself was continually modified in action by contingencies.

John Adams opposed the second system in favor of the first, hence the title of the essay. The worldview of Adams and many other "Poundian heroes", like Dante and Confucius, exemplifies the "graduated" system of ethics. Dante in particular developed an intricate cosmology in his Divine Comedy, which inspired the structure of Pound's Cantos.

I believe this idea is crucial for understanding the Cantos on a deeper level. Pound represents many things in American culture that have basically gone extinct. He seems to have inherited a system of values from Adams, one that may have been common knowledge among the elites of medieval Europe and China, and earlier, in ancient Sparta. And it will probably take years to understand any of this in appreciable depth. Unfortunately, people only seem to care about Ezra Pound's association with Italian fascism - whether or not they agree with that artificial ideology. The 20th century destroyed most of the old world, and nuance is one of the many casualties. And Ezra Pound knew where the wind was blowing:

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.