indirection and on a mismatch of form and content have a politics
attached to them, that the individual psyche must not be compromised
by the common. And so what in Coleridge is a freedom that art promises
for everyone becomes in Pound a freedom which constantly needs to be
asserted against everyone else. This hatred of any interference in the
individual’s rights has been traced to sources as various as Yeatsian ideas
of nobility, Emersonian self-reliance and Jamesian pragmatism, but it is
certain that Pound also found much support in the philosophy of Max
Stirner which lies behind the title of the magazine he sub-edited,The
Egoist.^80 Stirner’s basis was his belief that the perfect uniqueness of each
self is compromised by its relations with anything outside it, and is
irreducible to any common terms of morality or social concern, because
they require a part of the ego to be thought about in terms other than
itself, which would threatens that uniqueness. Effectively, in its criticism
of those who believe in a ‘higher being’ as ‘involuntary egoists’, Stirner’s
philosophy is a plea against government and law on the basis of a plea
against self-division:
Developing yourself, you get away ‘from yourself,’ that is from the self that was
at that moment. As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in
this very ‘creature’ you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself
a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But thatyouare the one that is
higher than you, that is, that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator
- just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and the ‘higher essence’
is to you – an alien essence. Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind, and so
on, is an essenceoverus.^81
There is a direct continuity between Stirner’s belief that higher essences
are falsifications and Pound’s unhesitant declaration that ‘humanity is a
collection of individuals, not awholedivided into segments or units’,
despite the fact that the etymology of the word ‘individual’ contradicts
him.^82 The poetics and politics of autonomy come together in Pound’s
assessment of the relation of art to government: ‘The Renaissance...
rose in a search for precision and declined through rhetoric and rhet-
orical thinking, through a habit of defining things always “in the terms
of something else”.’^83
Yet Pound’s verdict unconsciously reveals the problem with its own
policies. For what use is definition, if it is not in terms of something else?
A world of unique items is an utterly indescribable world, and paradoxic-
ally, a world where there is less individuality, not more. Presented with a
group of singular things which are entirely incommensurable, it becomes
a matter of indifference to choose between them.^84 Paradoxically, a world
40 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism