Canto VII Inertia Quotes

After spending some time wander-moping, Pound decides to just put his cards on the table and to call out the people he thinks are responsible for the crumminess of the modern world. Basically, he feels like the biggest problem with people is inertia, meaning that modern people are simply stuck in their ways, uninterested in really hearing new ideas or doing anything that takes them out of their routines. This commitment to never changing sucks the life out of these people, and anything they say just ends up being "a shell of speech."

According to Pound, modern people suffering from inertia barely have the motivation to sit up under their own power. To help convey this lack of energy or enthusiasm, Pound describes these people as being propped between chairs and table, like old men who can't even sit up straight without someone else coming in and moving them.

According to Canto VII, there is a special commitment to beauty and newness that should exist inside each and every one of us. When this force is absent, though, we just turn into shells of the people we could have been, and we are "moved by no inner being."

Them's fightin' words, mister. Pound doesn't just blame the problems of modern people on ignorance. In fact, he feels like some of the worst offenses of modern life come from the dry, professorial talk of educated people. For Pound, the problem isn't the lower classes, but the middle classes, which are filled with people who know enough about the classical past to try to imitate it, but who are so lazy about it that they do a terrible job. Thus, everything they say is just boring and empty, and they end up saying a bunch of stuff that has no real meaning.

In case you haven't realized how much Pound doesn't like boring modern people, he gets a little bit repetitive the farther he goes into Canto VII. He really can't stress enough how big a problem it is that modern people have nothing valuable to say (according to him). These people just want to read stuff in books and repeat it without really thinking hard about it or studying it further. For these people, knowing what you're talking about isn't the important thing. You just need to appear as if you know stuff.

At first, it seemed like inertia was to blame for the problems with modern people. But here, Pound suggests that there's more to blame than just that. It turns out that modern people are dedicated to protecting their inertia at any cost. It's not as if they're just lazy. They will actually do almost anything to make sure no young people come along with new ideas and disturb the way things are.