American poet, a leader of Imagism and Vorticism and one of McLuhan's "men of 1914" alongside Lewis, Eliot, and Joyce. Cameron places Pound among the would-be "world engineers" who wanted to make the world a "perception lab" — and whom McLuhan, save for the religion-turning Eliot, judged to be on a wrong path.
Across the dialogues
One of the "men of 1914" — a would-be world engineer McLuhan judged to be on the wrong path
Among the "men of 1914," McLuhan credited Eliot for turning to religion but judged Pound — with Lewis and Joyce — to be on a wrong path.
"McLuhan thought Eliot was on the right track by turning to religion, but that Lewis, Pound and Joyce were on a wrong path, ultimately."
Pound shared the Vorticist ambition McLuhan ascribed to Lewis — a would-be "world engineer," priest of a magical priesthood remaking perception.
"I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex Maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce, and Pound had similar aspirations."
Surfaces in McLuhan's letter to Pound — his grasp of words in the creative process conceded, but "words have become a drug"
In his letter to Pound, McLuhan grants that Pound and Joyce understood words in the creative process, but he must face that "words have become a drug."
"you understood the role of words and language in the creative process, but I have to deal with the fact that words have become a drug."
Conscripted by the Tech Body — his name turned into the warrant that the educated have grasped only "a silly, glib cliché to archetype of things you can't understand"
Pound enlisted as the Tech Body's witness against the academy — the "educated fools" who "read a book" only "prove that Ezra Pound was right," that their learning is "a silly, glib cliché to archetype of things you can't understand," his name standing for the verdict that the schools evade their own subject.
"They find out that they've proved that Ezra Pound was right."
The addressee of McLuhan's "we party" refusal — the letter in which McLuhan, putting "we" in quotes, declines the crowd's collective voice for the small serious "we"
Promoted from wrong-path modernist to the hinge of McLuhan's whole formation — the eclectic erudition that tore McLuhan out of literary provincialism into politics, economics, and history, so the Tech Body's "without Ezra Pound there is no Marshall McLuhan" reads as a "correct fallacy"
The essay's "correct fallacy," which Cameron converts into biography — reading everything of Pound's, his translations "from Old English to Chinese" and his eclecticism "increased McLuhan['s] scope on history," forcing him past a purely literary past into "politics and economics and society" and pushing him to reread Joyce "through… the universalism of Pound."
"without Ezra Pound, there is no Marshall McLuhan."
The addressee of the 1951 letter — the "master usurer" science-fiction warning written in borrowed "Pound lingo," the Idaho prairie idiom McLuhan reached for when writing to him
Cameron notes the letters' idiom — McLuhan borrowing Pound's own vernacular (the Giedion "gone," the prairie slang) when he wrote to him, the 1951 "applied science, the master usurer" warning cast in the recipient's voice.
"So when McLuhan was writing to Pound, occasionally he would try to use Pound lingo."
Supplies the image for the strength the session has been circling — a pivot that holds only because it wobbles, which is the stability Cameron says the world now lacks
The figure resolves the session's circular problem about faith — stability that depends on instability is exactly the "non-foundational strength" Cameron attributes to McLuhan, given a mechanism instead of a paradox.
"It's the pivot, which seems to be fixed in place, but it's fixed in place only through its wobbling."
Connections
One of the "men of 1914"; McLuhan judged Pound (with Lewis and Joyce) to be on a wrong path — only the religion-turning Eliot on the right track.
Grouped with Lewis and Joyce as would-be "world engineers" who wanted to make the world a "perception lab."
Sherry reads Pound and Lewis as heirs to a French "ideology" — the study of images and sense-impressions running from Condorcet and Tracy through Saint-Simon and Comte.