Cantos, where it is regularly associated with the neo-Platonic “great ball of
crystal” (see esp. Cantos 100, 116), the Plotinian nous celebrated by Pound’s
favorite medieval philosophers and poets. Canto 51, for example, opens with
a citation from Guido Guinicelli’s Al cor gentil: “Shines / in the mind of
heaven God / who made it / more than the sun / in our eye” and in Canto 55,
we read:
Honour to chin-tsong the modest
Lux enim per se omnem in partem
Reason from heaven, saith Tcheou Ton-y
enlighteneth all things
seipsum seipsum diffundit, risplende^13Michael André Bernstein comments:
Chin-song (Shên-Tsung) was one of the Chinese Emperors... of whom
Pound approved because of his able administration and adherence to
the Confucian ideal of the just ruler.
The next line as well as part of the last one is a variation of Robert
Grosseteste’s (c. 1175–1253) statement in his treatise De Luce, “Lux enim
per se in omnem partem se ipsum diffundit,” and means, “For light,
of its nature shines (diffuses itself ) in all directions.”... Tcheou Ton-y
(Chou Tun-I) was a noted Confucian scholar and philosopher (1017–
1073) who wrote a commentary on the I Ching. The theory here attrib-
uted to [him] is one dear to Pound, neo-Platonism, and Confucianism:
the natural relationship between heaven and earth is one of essential
harmony; the cosmos is governed by a divine reason.... The repetition
of “seipipsum, seipsum” (itself, itself ) suggests a cry of joy.^14The light shines forth. Risplende.
But the fact is that even ardent expositors of Pound’s Confucianism and
neo-Platonism have had to concede that the privileged moments in The Can-
tos when the poet is able to celebrate the chêng ming and invoke the “great
acorn of light” (116/813) are largely offset—indeed, contradicted—by the ac-
tual verbal texture of Pound’s “epic including history.” For Bernstein, this
contradiction suggests a “chronic limitation” of Pound’s ideogrammic tech-
nique. When, for example, in Canto 54, the line “and han was after 43 years
of tsin dynasty,” is juxtaposed to the lines, “some cook, some do not cook,
/ some things can not be changed” (54/275), with their reference to the fric-
tion between Pound’s wife, Dorothy, and mistress, Olga, in their ménage
Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 43