Ezra Pound, RAW and The "Two Cultures"

A micro-micro intellectual history, on 10/30/25, Pound's 140th birthday

In 1959, British chemist Lord C.P. Snow gave a lecture, which was promptly printed into a thin volume: The Two Cultures, which immediately went viral. Yes, a book about the intellectuals on the Humanities and Physical Science side of the university: went viral. ‘Twas a different time, verily. In Snow’s lecture, he lamented the gulf between the Physical Sciences guys, and the Humanities people. He argued that his guys, the physicists, chemists, and biologists, were open-minded towards the Humanities but the non-scientist intellectuals wanted to have nothing to do with Science, or its language, mathematics. Okay, but Why are they so separated?

There seems to be no place where the cultures meet. I am not going to waste time saying that this is a pity. It is much worse than that. Soon I shall come to some practical consequences. But at the heart of thought and creation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures - of two galaxies, so far as that goes - ought to produce creative chances.¹

I was tempted to italicize “heart of thought and creation” and then say they’re mine, not in the original. But the whole damned lecture/essay is hyperbolic like this. But that’s not the part I find maddening. Nor is it the world-revolves-around-Cambridge assumptions of Lord Snow. It’s the claim that his scientist guys work all day in their mathematical languages, but when they get some time, they really do want to read Shakespeare, the current poets, history books, the latest in Art history, etc. But those Humanities people are almost proud to not know any science. And they seem to hate mathematics.

Now: we all know some professors in which this rings true. I have known a few who line up fairly close with Snow’s straw man argument here. But I’ve known more Humanities people who are fascinated with science and who assume the two cultures are unnecessary. Perhaps it was way different back then. Sure, the science guys get far, far, FAR more funding.² In 1959 the divergence of our great universities as “research” schools was only beginning. Snow wouldn’t recognize them. But I suspect he’d be delighted, much like Francis Crick, who in his 1967 lecture made into a book, Of Molecules and Men, agreed with Snow’s thesis and furthermore, was happy the Humanities were dying and science blossoming. (see pp.93-96 in Crick)

Francis, you’re not helping Snow’s argument there…

Snow wrote about how weird it was to go viral back in 1959 in an essay published in 1964, The Two Cultures: A Second Look. He names other people who were talking about these same ideas around the same time (Jacob Bronowski, Merle King, ADC Peterson), and he’s flexing while saying he got lucky and was in the right place at the right time, these ideas must have been in the air, etc. He was astonished seeing a public discussion of his thesis catching fire in places like Hungary, Japan, and Poland. Snow laments that, “A few, a very few, of the criticisms have been loaded with personal abuse to an abnormal extent…” and that some had personally approached him to ask if they could reprint what so-and-so said about him. (It was FR Leavis; Snow refuses to mention him. Leavis, a champion of Pound, Yeats, Eliot and Hopkins and a friend of Wittgenstein, thought Snow had been flatulent and pretentious and excoriated him in Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow.)

Why the Hubbub?

Simply because two cultures idea had really flared up with the intellectual and ruling classes of Europe using the physical sciences to not only win the war (Hitler had driven out the best minds of that generation, terrified by antisemitism, haunted anxiety-ridden shod, dragging themselves and their suitcases through Paris and Lisbon, looking for a saving ticket to UCLA or The New School…) but invented a whole slew of products for consumers. Meanwhile, the English profs had been eggheads who seem to object to the widening gulf between haves and have-nots, and therefore, are a Huge Drag who just don’t “get” progress. I oversimplify, but you get my point.

Then Snow piles it on 14 years after the war, and it was just a bit too much for a lot of the types of intellectuals who had never specialized in any one academic domain. The generalists, the relatively unattached free-floating stratum of bohemian thinkers, flaneurs reeking of herbs, obsessive autodidacts, and drop-out scholars, some who’d been to University but who did not become academics, or who were in academia for a while but it was not a good fit. Ezra Pound was asked to leave. Robert Anton Wilson was an Engineer who was interested in everything but was mostly a freelance writer³. Pound was also interested in everything. There were a lot of people like this: highly literate thinkers who were also interested in science.

1963

Having always been a prominent intellectual who wrote both novels and essays and a deep reader in science, Aldous Huxley published Literature and Science, taking Snow at his word, urged more Humanities types to read science, even though, “Whether we like it or not, ours is the age of Science.” (p.70) Huxley, whose brother Julian won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1963, was from one of the most prominent intellectual families in Europe, Aldous’s and Julian’s grandpa being “Darwin’s Bulldog.” So, while Snow was taking a victory lap in 1963, four years after he made his name with the Rede Lecture on “the two cultures,” there’s Aldous publishing his pro-science book for his literary audience. Then, in November of that year, dying of oral cancer, Aldous took a massive dose of LSD and died the same day as the JFK hit.

(Ezra Pound)

Special Case: Ezra Pound

Pound, who we might argue single-handedly pronounced a revolution in the Arts, and especially poetry, then actually successfully carried it off, had always been attracted to science. In 1996, scholar Maria Luisa Ardizzone published Machine Art and Other Writings, from previous unpublished work by Pound between the years 1927 and 1943. It’s a basic attack on the Aristotelian/spectatorial view of knowledge, which placed “theory” on high, while Pound argues that techné is an Art, and superior, all of which goes against Snow’s argument.

Since Leibnitz there has been no theology, and no philosophy. That is to say, there have been essays on philosophic subjects, but the thought has been a mere weak derivative from scientific discovery. IT IS ALIVE. It says nothing about not fishing on Sunday or about having only one woman or about fealty to the constitution. (Machine Art, p.119, “How To Write”)

Pound here is riffing on the “splendor of the cosmos” and he wants nothing to do with monotheism, but is only interested in an erotic, universal cosmology, and science, and fer gawdsakes: not “economics”: science was where it wuz at for this Poet.

Whenever a scientist has come into contact with the practice of hired economists, he has been both amazed and disgusted. A “science” which excluded facts from its investigation and demonstration is not rated very high among physicists, biologists, chemists. (119, op.cit.)

The conspicuous problem here is Pound’s nutty, hideous antisemitism of this period. At the end of his life he admitted he’d been wrong. But this issue is too complex to go into here. Suffice: my feeling is that most people who thought they knew Pound didn’t realize how impressed he was with the methods and instigations of physical scientists. Pound was a very complex sort of vitalist; his fellow poets and sculptors, painters and novelists were not going to help him here. In inventing his ideogrammic poetic method he thought he was mimicking a scientific technique, to use for poetry and even expository writing. In an overwhelmingly creative misreading of Chinese writing he had put poetry and writing on a scientific footing. “I am not offering a system of thought, if that means a few idées fixes arranged in a pattern on a shelf. I offer a system of thinking. Any biologist will understand you if you say mankind is my bug.” (112) His influence was enormous.

From c. 1980 Counting Back to 1963

Novelist, essayist, playwright and counterculture figure Robert Anton Wilson, trained as an Engineer, largely because he thought he had a facility with mathematics, wrote the following in a footnote in a novel from the late 1970s, as if the novel had been annotated in the year 2803:

At the time of this comedy those primates who specialized in verbal manipulations of the third neurological circuit formed a gene-pool separate from those who specialized in mathematical manipulations. The former, controlling the verbal environment, had dubbed themselves “the intellectuals.”⁴

RAW almost sounds like Snow here. But RAW was far more complex a thinker than Snow. Let us continue.

In a 1971 book by Pound scholar Christine Brooke-Rose, she’s discussing the ideogrammic method, and writes:

What I want to emphasize now is that Pound, long before the present fashion for the “two cultures,” insisted that this ideogrammic way of seeing, or proceeding, was the way not only of art but of science, which he liked to bring together, but together against “logic.” ⁵

(Robert Anton Wilson)

Big-Time Literary Modernist Scholar: Hugh Kenner (and RAW)

In June of 1963, Hugh Kenner, prolific academic scholar of Pound and Joyce, received a letter from Robert Anton Wilson, an itinerant writer raising his family on a farm near the woods, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was working for the Antioch Bookplate Company and writing articles like mad and sending them out, trying to keep food on the table. He’d published an essay “Joyce and Taoism” in the James Joyce Quarterly on or around his 27th birthday in 1959; also around this time he published an essay, “The Semantics of God” for the early counterculture magazine The Realist, run by Paul Krassner. It is apparent that Kenner had announced he was writing a book called The Pound Era. It wouldn’t come out until 1971, but RAW must have read that Kenner was writing it, because it seems one of the reasons he wrote the Professor.

So let’s get the picture: a highly esteemed academic receives a letter - actually, a series of letters⁶ - from a nobody named Wilson, who was 31 years old at the time. What’s astonishing is the manic and haughty tone of RAW to Kenner. I cannot help but think RAW got most of this attitude from Pound; RAW had been reading Pound since his teenage years, and while Pound’s attitude towards Jews was abhorrent to him, RAW trained himself to look for what’s valuable in any artistic or scientific genius, no matter how offensive some statement they’d made or some scandalous some action. RAW, who died in 2007, would have had a lot to say about “cancel culture,” but alas, he’s not around and that’s a separate issue. Let’s get on with it.

I have to cut a lot out because these letters are wild, manic and, I think, amazing. We only have so much room. Back to mid-June, 1963:

At one point, RAW calls C.P. Snow an “ass-hole” when in The Two Cultures, he “blythely (sic) demonstrates his own ignorance of the significant developments in the arts of our time/because he writes imitation Victorian novels, he imagines he is hip to modern literature…”

Snow the chemist had also published a bunch of novels. What bothered RAW was that Snow had paid no attention to Pound’s revolution, or Ulysses, or any of the experimental poetic and prose forms invented after the 1880s. For RAW’s aesthetics, this is egregious. He thought the Arts should keep up with Science, and once in the late 1950s he gave a talk to New York literati and claimed that the only literature was science fiction and James Joyce. He realized they thought he was insane. Which was fine for him: he thought the New York literary publishing establishment was reactionary and a drag on human progress, the New Yorkers assuming that Freud and Marx were still the hottest ideas around. They didn’t want to talk about Joyce and they seemed to want to pretend that science fiction didn’t even exist, based on their neglect in reviewing those books. For RAW, science fiction was the epicenter of the Novel of Ideas. The New York literati didn’t much like science, either. He was happy to tick them off. If I recall correctly, RAW said they “acted like I’d killed a cat in the sacristy.”

RAW then goes off informing Kenner that ideograms are synergetic, “and so is science,” that he’d worked out a synthesis of Buckminster Fuller and Pound “years ago” (1963!), and that “Synergy (non-additive relations) is the one concept that helps you to find your way from the sciences to the arts and back again…” 24 years later, RAW was still talking and writing about synergy, in an interview from 1987 and published in Natural Law:

Sun: You’ve been quite outspoken, in your writings and in your talk last night, about your use of mind-altering drugs. Would you say you’ve gotten more out of drugs than out of therapy?

RAW: Yes. But it’s hard to say. Everything is synergistic. Today is the result of everything that’s happened in my life. I think the study of General Semantics did as much for me as psychotherapy did. If somebody doing Buddhist meditation today had been in Freudian psychoanalysis twenty years ago, and had been at several encounter groups, then they’re doing a different type of Buddhist meditation than someone who’s never had that experience. But just because something seems to have done you more good than something else doesn’t mean it’s better than the other thing; the other experience might have created the ground work for the newer one to be effective.⁷

Back to the wild letter to Kenner, June 1963:

There is one equation that explains the structure of the Cantos⁸ better than any words can explain it, and it is a synergistic equation.

Eight days later, Kenner gets a somehow even more manic letter from this Wilson guy. Here’s a snippet:

Shannon’s information equation (quoted in my “13 Ways”⁹) is synergetic function. Strangely enough, or not strangely at all, so is C.H. Douglas’s equation for cultural heritage, and so is Korzybski’s equation for “time-binding.” Information, structural knowledge, texne, increases non-additively.

So, this nobody writing to Hugh Kenner at UC Santa Barbara (he was there from 1951-1973) is telling Kenner how to think about Pound. He’s also elaborating about Chinese writing, more ideogrammic theory, all kinds of things. I suspect RAW wanted to get in with Kenner, or earn his gratitude. Maybe he’ll even mention “Robert Anton Wilson” somewhere in his (still eight years off) The Pound Era, now widely called Kenner’s magnum opus.

Well, that book does not mention RAW, anywhere. However, Kenner does mention RAW in a letter to Guy Davenport dated June 21, 1963:

Have hooked on to an amiable crank named Bob Wilson, formerly of the School of Living in Ohio, now at Antioch Bookplate Company in Yellow Springs, O, who is loading me with Pound-Fuller-Wright-China-Korzybski-Gesell tieups. These Utopian absolutists make me nervous…¹⁰

I’ve read The Pound Era a couple of times. I find it hard to believe Kenner wasn’t influenced by RAW, and neglected to mention him, but maybe I shouldn’t be all that surprised: if we dig into the McLuhan archives there’s a letter to an undergrad from McLuhan berating him for not giving proper credit where it was due. It was to a young Hugh Kenner.

However, I can’t prove this. Maybe Kenner encountered those ideas before 1963.

Not being an academic, I don’t know how common that sort of thing is. Let us laud Kenner for his wonderful work. But maybe let’s keep this kind of thing in mind, too. Kenner’s pre-1963 writing barely touches in synergy, information theory, non-additive structures, etc. But they are there in spades in his 1971 book. RAW didn’t at least plant a seed?

I’m not so adept at scholarly exegesis to make a strong argument about RAW’s influence on Kenner’s magisterial The Pound Era, but I have my suspicions. RAW wrote Kenner a letter in 1974 and doesn’t outright say, Hey you didn’t mention me anywhere, but from the text I think he clearly thought he deserved to be mentioned.

To review: there are many intellectuals outside of academia that Lord Snow preferred to not even recognize; certain types of intellectuals have had the urge to unify or cross-pollinate the sciences with the Humanities since the Age of Reason. This was just one example of a weird instance of Science + Arts thinking: Ezra Pound and Robert Anton Wilson, both working outside the Groves, and apparently Pound as persona non grata to Lord Snow and RAW a mere “crank” to Hugh Kenner.

1. The Two Cultures and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, p.16

2. This observation was true in the US until the past 10 months. Who knows what that status really is, today?

3. Erik Davis labeled RAW, Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna “garage philosophers” in book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterican and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019, M.I.T. Press); garage philosophers were “the feral ranks of the underground intelligentsia,” p.219. In a tweeted answer to my query about the term on July 6, 2019, Davis wrote, “I did mint the term, which Simon (Critchely: a fellow scholar- OG) admired, and did it for the Exegesis initially. What I like is not just the non-institutional DIY side of the story, but the sense of ‘garage’ as both puttering/wood shedding and ‘I don’t give a fuck intensity.” The Exegesis is a 944 page book culled from what seems literally thousands of pages Philip K. Dick wrote about his impossible-to-explain-here weird personal experiences.

4. The Trick Top Hat, a second novel in the Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, omnibus ed, p. 230. These three novels all use roughly the same core characters, but they are living in different universes as patterned after three different interpretations of the Schrödinger wave equation. A reviewer from New Scientist, John Gribbin, read these novels and said they must have been written by a physicist.

5. A ZBC of Ezra Pound, (1971), pp.7-8. Pound’s suspicion of formal logic is widespread and discursive yet disparate throughout his texts. Suffice: formal logic seems too artificial and abstract compared to the sort of bio- or neuro-logic of human observation and very close attention to detail that works along the mental mode or networks we think of as “logic” but is not Aristotelian, Boolean, or any of the other formal, two-valued logic of True/False. The bio-logic is closer to reality. Wilson appreciated this logic, too, but wrote much more about multi-valued, non-Aristotelian logics and managed to be humorous about it.

6. Kenner’s archives are at the Harry Ransom Center at the U. of Texas, a hotbed of literary archives, and the archivists and librarians there I’ve found are most helpful.

7. Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy and Other Writings From a Natural Outlaw, Hilaritas Press ed, p.145. The interviewer was Sy Safransky of The Sun magazine. The original edition of Natural Law was put out by Loompanics in 1987.

8. Ezra Pound’s lifelong work, in case you’re comin’ in late.

9. “13 Ways” was a sort of aesthetic-scientific manifesto RAW wrote. I’ll be writing about it here or elsewhere soon.

10. Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport & Hugh Kenner, vol. one, edited by Edward M. Burns, p.354.

(artwork by Bobby Campbell)