SOURCE: "From Priest to Victim: The Problem of a Sacrifice in Allen Upward and Ezra Pound," in Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 53-69.

In the following excerpt, Ching provides a close study of The Divine Mystery as a means of shedding understanding on the symbol of blood sacrifice in Pound's work.

Sacrifice has long interested poets, long before anthropology supposedly tore the veil of mystery from the cruel rite, and after.¹ The blood sacrifice in Ezra Pound's canto 1 illustrates the magical spell of sacrifice, as a modern poet anchors the epic for and of his time in a primitive rite of killing. There is a conventional glorification of sacrifice, sanctioned by religious and primitivistic impulses, that cushions it from adverse criticism by poets, sometimes even distracting an anthropologist from his path of scientific inquiry. Literary criticism nowadays, however, refuses more and...