On Putting Your (Reflective) Back into It

04 Jan, 2026

One of the book-based thrills of the past few days has been getting into Hugh Kenner’s beautifully dense doorstopper, The Pound Era. His approach to depicting the world out of which Ezra Pound and his peers emerged, how they changed and made their way through it, is, as a blurb on the back cover puts it, unapologetically “demanding, enticing.”¹ Race through it and you’ll miss both the meat and the point: that our thoughts and how we shape and express them have a history, and that it’s crucial to understand that history and to be intentional about how we carry it forward.

You also can’t make these things explicit in a brief gloss; including notes and index, the book is 606 pages long. I’m not a slow reader, but in addition to dealing with a dense text that requires more deliberate attention than usual, my stopping every page or so to mark down a nice phrase or observation means this one will take a while—a while that, a little over a hundred pages in, I know will be worth it.

Worth it not because I’m keen on Pound and want to know more about him or his work; his poetry, if it’s ever made any sense to me, period, usually leaves me cold. Kenner’s already got me gleeful, though; his laying out of what’s going on with this man points to the fact that I’m probably not alone, and that I’m also not simply too dull to get it. Published in 1971, The Pound Era was even then looking back on a thought-world that had already died, at how the assumptions and practices of the early twentieth century would be definitively cut down and left behind in the wake of World War I. “Some things,” Kenner says in the way certain people can make the obvious newly recognizable, “were current once that are current no longer.” Pound grew up when late nineteenth-century archaeological forays had more than cloistered professors excited about what could have been happening in ancient Greece—and when cheap bilingual editions of Dante were selling like hotcakes. One British version of the Paradiso “was issued in 1899 and reprinted 1900, 1901, 1903, 1904, 1908, 1910, 1912”; and that was alongside not only other of the poet’s works, but translations as well of Provençal troubadours. The war, though, brought about “[t]he collapse of that public,” which meant that a collection of poems Pound published in 1923, centered as they were in that recently destroyed world, were a puzzle to readers: “their subject had been erased from literate consciousness.”²

Pound’s style developed and changed as he grew into his own while Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, and others were doing so as well. And yet, nothing about him (or Eliot) has gotten easier or more enjoyable for me thanks to Kenner’s book. Another yet: here I still am, loving the journey that’s both difficult and more illuminating than any other examination of the poet’s work and times I’ve come across. I may not end up loving Pound (or Eliot) in the end, but the greater appreciation I’ve already developed for where they were coming from and why they approached words as they did has been more than worth it.

I know most people would scoff at much, if not all, of what I’ve just said. What’s the point in trying to understand poets you don’t like—people who are long gone, who have no practical influence on the world, and who won’t do anything to get you anywhere at all? Why all that work, when no promotion or recognition or bonus appears as a result?

The link I’m about to make isn’t a good one, but let’s see if it can help me make my point. In 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University, touting his plan to get a real space program going. His call for support included a “capsule history of [human] progress” that was explicit about how difficult it had been to get where we were, especially in as short a time as we as a species had been around. The summary was of course celebratory of the way the United States “was conquered by those who moved forward,” and presented that history of invasion and domination as something to emulate when considering outer space. But Kennedy probably recognized even that standard method of rousing Americans wouldn’t do; for one thing, he had to convince this crowd why such an outlay of money and time—but let’s face it, really the money—should be devoted to blasting off into space. What I’ll assume, especially given the Cold War era, was his real reasoning was that the US had to “win” the space race so that the Commies wouldn’t. But he had to top off his plea with some additional call to the amazing backbone Americans like to believe they have. Why should we want to do this thing, he asked. Why do we want to do anything at all? We want and should want to get to the moon “and do the other things,” he asserted, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”³

There’s too much to analyze about the space program and the Cold War and the Kennedy administration, too much even in any given statement, to claim we can have the last word on it. But what’s stood out to me since I first heard this speech as a teen on some documentary was that insistence that we’d want to do something because it was hard, because that option was recognizably, obviously better than just coasting along in ease and/or laziness. From his inauguration speech on, Kennedy put forth this general mix of calls to responsibility (probably most famously, “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”⁴) and world-police admonitions, a blend that provided a nice model for all the later Democratic Party speechifying that would make more than a few of us despair about even the so-called good side’s concerns and intentions for the nation and everyone else (Harris’s insistence on having “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” anyone?⁵). We can and should critique all the assumptions about American exceptionalism and capitalism and militarism and more that are hidden or overt in all of it—as well as why no one thought or thinks it seemed possible to make the same sorts of arguments for bucking up and coughing up the cash in order to end poverty, homelessness, and any other of our home planet’s long-running problems.⁶ But as I recently asked a friend, can you imagine anyone these days thinking they’d get anything but blank stares, much less enthusiasm, if you asked a US citizen, drooling over their phones and same-day shipping and glad LinkedIn’s AI will craft even their responses to others’ posts for them, to get excited about an undertaking because it was hard?

Kenner asserts that “Part of the primitive fascination of a story is this, that we often cannot be sure why it has been told.” He goes further and says that “‘Why am I reading this?’ is a different question” than “Why are we being told that?” and that the answers to these queries will change with the times.⁷ Considering, though, what’s being asked is important if you want to understand where and how and with whom you are. Why are politicians telling us what they’re telling us? Why are we reading one pundit’s column and not another’s, or one novelist or poet and not another? Wondering these things are essential ways of reflecting on ourselves and individuals and collectivities, and trying to come to some conclusion about it all is not a quick, much less an easy, process.

Roland Barthes recognized this situation in his own way, and saw, too, that part of what made it hard, in particular for “intellectuals,” was how outraged or snide people could and can be about the importance they place on thinking about questions like these. The detractors are ugly because they see the work as a waste of time; resentful because they think it’s not in fact work at all, when the rest of us have to slave away for pennies at stupid jobs; they’re offended by intellectuals’ criticisms of things they find good or important or unassailable. A so-called intellectual could probably start questioning why he’s doing this at all for all the thanks he gets, and the lack of difference any of this really makes; he could grow exhausted at having to be “both an analyst and a utopian,” and having to “calculate the world’s difficulties, and also its wild desires; he strives to be a philosophical and historical contemporary of the present,” and that’s no easy thing to keep up with. But he does it because he knows that without these questioning, critical voices, the result is silencing and persecution of anyone, of whatever persuasion, who does want to speak up. The intellectualizing, then, is crucial, because the very possibility of its absence is terrifying. “What,” he asks, "would be the worth of a society that ceased to reflect upon itself? What would become of it? And how can we see ourselves except by talking to one another?”⁸

There, in that final question, is the necessary part of the larger essential task, and the one that’s probably hardest of all to undertake. If we’re to do anything beyond just survive, we have to do the hard work of understanding what’s brought us to where we are: where and how and why the problems and confusions, challenges and barriers and rare good things arose. That takes a lot of sifting and reading and review that might feel useless, immersion in so much dead and unfashionable and not immediately profitable stuff. And let’s face it, US Americans have never been great at honest self-reflection, and it’s more maddening than ever, and that for any number of reasons, to try and have a simple conversation, much less one that gets at what we think our deepest principles and commitments and expectations might or should be. Even the thought of it is exhausting, infinitely more stress-inducing than getting through 600 pages of literary theory. At this point, though, it seems like we’re in more desperate need than ever of that long, very long and very hard work. It might be one of the only really worthwhile endeavors around, maybe even the only one that could ultimately save us from the unreflective mess we’ve made of our home and so much more.

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