Canto VII Society and Class Quotes

When he mentions the columns of false marble, Pound is singling out England's boring, tacky middle class for criticism. Basically, he's saying that you can't just go and buy some cheap stuff that looks like Greek columns and expect people to think it's impressive. Great art doesn't care about the prices of things. It doesn't even think about money at all. Only beauty counts, and the false marble columns here are a symbol of how the money-obsessed middle classes are just cheap and tacky, like the columns they put in their houses.

Not only does the middle class tend to decorate poorly, but they do so in houses that don't even belong to them. In this passage, we learn that the house with the false marble columns is actually a leasehold, meaning that the people living in it are renters instead of owners. In a world where people's relationships to things are this temporary and uncommitted, Pound asks us how we can ever expect to pursue worthwhile goals, especially when it comes to beauty.

When he imagines the boredom and inertia of the English middle class, Pound tends to focus his criticism on the image of a plain dinner table, where he can picture middle class people sitting and barely holding themselves upright. Since there's nothing worthwhile motivating the people from this class, we can't expect them to contribute much to the history of humanity. Instead, they just play out the same boring dinner-table conversations over and over.