The Ant and the Centaur Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)It is a sin to answer questions, for magic lies in mystery rather than fact. The great literature, therefore, does not provide answers, rather it kindles the wonderment of enigma within the soul of the reader. Having felt the glorious abandonment of enlightened ignorance, one is then qualified to pose one's own questions. Dr Brown is guilty of little sin and a Great Writer he undeniably is. He captures more beautiful angles of mystery within this short text than most authors you're more likely to have heard of grapple with in a life time.

Archetypes are old laundry, regurgitated cliché. Ezra Pound is no archetype. However, he can be said to contain the essence of poetry, the spirit of revelation and of mysticism. He was also a human being. That a man must be a mouthpiece for the muse is a small and strange miracle in itself, that a man may be as hated in his lifetime as his art is adored follows simply from this truth. "The Ant and The Centaur" is not a description of the human being who works for beauty, rather it is a portrait of his life. The narrative remains claustrophobically fixed within the viewpoint of one character, like a poet in a gorilla cage or an angel within a sane body.

The prose in no way imitates Pound's writing style, however the shape of the story contains the same mixture of banality and divinity. While an old man is supported through the sanitised halls of a lunatic asylum, the Deus Ex Poetica gives an omniscient commentary in an accent "that seemed Scottish, English and American, with a lilting cadence", warning it's mortal counterpart to "Fear the Gods and the stupidity of the populace".

Such literature is rare and beautiful, if I may quickly sympathise with Joel Proctor, then I should like to ask what democracy is without a free press. That usury controls us all and that it has it's grimy hands clenched around the business of printing is a sad truth. As a result, literature such as this does not achieve the circulation it should. Perhaps the rabid masses could be uplifted by pondering the imponderable in a society where fact is packaged, stamped and sent at them through the screen.

Naturally, I am rambling. The main thrust of this, my review, is read the story. You'll like it.

S.D.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Ant and the Centaur