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Principles
You might not agree with everything (or anything) Pound has to say in Canto VII. But you have to admit that the guy's pretty consistent when it comes to his principles. For Pound, all that really matters is beauty—and not your modern magazine idea of beauty. He's talking about the kind of beauty that people used to celebrate in classic times and the middle ages. In short, Pound is extremely nostalgic in his principles. He wants to bring all the greatness of bygone eras into the modern world. But the truth is that even if he could do this, he'd still find something wrong with it. That's what nostalgia is all about. You can say that things were better in the past, quite frankly, because there's no way of going back and proving whether you're right or wrong.
In Canto VII, Pound lays out many of the principles that will obsess him for his entire Cantos project. And there is no principle more important to him than the principle of beauty.
In Canto VII, Pound waffles back and forth between hope and despair over whether or not beauty can exist in the modern world. And in the end, he seems to get stuck at a midway point between the two feelings.
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