Lord God of heaven that with mercy dight
Th’ alternate prayer wheel of the night and the light
Eternal hath to thee, and in whose sight
Our days as rain drops in the sea surge fall…

This is the first stanza in Ezra Pound’s first book of poems, A Lume Spento (“With Tapers Quenched”), which came out with a Venetian publishing house in July 1908. There will be more on what these lines mean in just a moment. It is worth noting beforehand that Pound’s second book, A Quinzaine for this Yule — a willfully obscure title — was published in London in December of the same year. It is a yuletide collection, a sort of avant-garde Christmas album. And it is striking to see Pound, enfant terrible of modernist poetry, open this second book with a prayer in the language of medieval romantic poetry. “O God”, he writes, “purify our hearts!” (O Dieu, purifiez nos coeurs!). Clearly, being a modernist does not rule out talking to God.

With this in mind, we come back to the first stanza of Pound’s debut. He is praying, here, to a deity clothed in love and compassion (“with mercy dight”). The image Pound creates in this short poem is a beautiful one, though he makes us work for it. His language is rebelliously outdated. In these early books, Pound is making himself a modernist by studiously refusing to write in a disillusioned 20th-century idiom. And he wants us to know that the “Lord God of Heaven” is the one in whose eyes all “our days” quickly fall, bright and translucent, “as rain drops in the sea”. All human urges and passions and acts are, to God, just “drops that dream and gleam and falling catch the sun”. They die, or we die, when we reach the vast undying sea. And our only life is to catch God’s light as we fall. Pound wants his own poems to be like that, he tells us. He wants his stanzas to dazzle like sunlit rain. Like “mirrors”, he says, “every opal one”. Mirrors that flash with sky.

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And this brings us, unexpectedly, back to Christmas. Pound returns to this image of life, literature, and God in a fragmentary poem that appears in his second book, A Quinzaine for this Yule. (With “quinzaine”, he is referring both to the fact that the book contains 15 poems, and that they offer a set of 15 quasi-liturgical readings at Christmastide.) Here, Pound finds something of the “magic of past time” in the image of a “sun-smit sea”. He now compares human life to sea spray. The “sea deep of the whole man-soul”, he claims, is somehow held within a single droplet. The whole “space” of any “individual being” is just a touch of “opal spray” that shoots up from the boundless deep. Each droplet only exists and catches the light of the world — and of God — because, for an instant, it is “going heavenward”.

Is there any real connection to Christmas, though? Or is this just a random image that Pound chose to include in his December 1908 book, after introducing it in July of the same year? Let’s see.

God reappears in Pound’s December poem — but at the end of the poem, now. In A Quinzaine for this Yule, Pound tells us where the “opal spray” of all human history ends: it falls into “the great whole liquid jewel of God’s truth”. What a line. Pound’s poetry is full of such gorgeousness. He seems to be at his best when writing about “the waters”, and it is fitting that he decides to call God, in his December book, the “God of waters”.

But again, we could ask: what does “the great whole liquid jewel of God’s truth” have to do with Christmas? And what does Christmas have to do with what Pound calls the “magic” of time? To begin with, Pound tells us in his Christmas book that he had a sort of vision of the Virgin Mary on the canals of Venice. Her presence there is one reason why God is, for him, the “God of waters”. And this is what Pound says, blending the medieval prayer we’ve already seen (“Purify our hearts!”) and a couple of biblical passages:

O God…
For we have seen 
The glory of the shadow of the
      likeness of thine handmaid…

As none of Pound’s original readers would have missed (but many will today), he is echoing here the words of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which Christians traditionally read in December. In her song, Mary blesses the Lord for being mindful of “the lowliness of his handmaiden”. The scandalously pregnant girl then makes a prophecy, one that has, incredibly, come true: “All generations shall call me blessed.” Pound himself blesses her, calling her in one early poem the “Virgin Mother”. His youthful reverence for Mary is something that connects him to the 19th-century Romantics: Jesus’ mother has a special place in Romantic art and culture that we do not yet fully understand.

But Mary is not the only sacred figure who appears “upon the shadow of the waters” in the pages of Pound’s Christmas book. He recalls, too, how Mary’s son once walked “upon the wave” in Galilee. The scene Pound has in mind is narrated in several of the Gospels. This is how it is told in the Gospel of Mark:

“About the fourth watch of the night Jesus came to the twelve disciples, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out; for they all saw him, and were terrified. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; have no fear.’ And he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded.”

Pound reworks this scene in A Quinzaine for this Yule. Though Jesus had seemed to be “some uncertain ghost” hovering on the Sea of Galilee, he tells his friends (in Pound’s words): “I am no spirit. Fear not me!” In a bold move, the poet then identifies himself and us, his modern readers, with “the twelve storm-tossed” that night in Galilee. And how does Pound make this identification between us and Jesus’ original disciples? “We bewildered”, he writes, “yet have trust in thee”. We, too, have somehow seen the son of Mary stride “upon the wave” in the lines of Pound’s poetry.

Now, I realize that a young bohemian glimpsing the figure of Mary one night as he is wandering through the “Venice of dreams”, and then vaguely evoking the “holier mystery” of Jesus himself walking — not as a ghost, but a “God-man” — on some ancient inland sea, might not seem to have much to do with a modern Christmas. But modernists want us to work for it, and the Gospel-writers, too, want us to work for it. And there is something here for us to work towards.

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We have already seen that Pound is attached to the image of history as a rain or “opal spray” on the surface of what we might call the “world-sea”. We are nothing, for him, but “drops that dream and gleam” in God’s light. We only exist as we fly skyward and then fall seaward. But with the one that Pound dubs the “God of waters”, there seems to be a further possibility. For both Jesus and his mother are figures that emerge from the world-sea. They are not just, like us, drops of rain or sea. And in the case of Mary’s son, Jesus, he is a figure who can walk — as a real man, not a phantom — on the world-sea.

And isn’t this what Christmas ultimately is? A celebration of the mystery — consciously or not, believingly or not — that “the great whole liquid jewel of God’s truth” once joined the “opal spray” of humanity in the person of Jesus? That the deep and unconditioned truth of the sea joined the evanescent condition of the spray, through the virgin-motherhood of Mary? That the magic of all time passed, somehow, through the magic of their time? And that the magic of their time still passes, somehow, through the grim magic of ours?

If all this seems too mystical or too occult for prewar avant-garde art — I assure you it is not. We are just far less mystical than the modernists. Pound makes no secret of his own eerie identification with Christ, or Christus as he calls him. He writes this in A Quinzaine for this Yule:

…in midmost us there glows a sphere
Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I”
And into this some form projects itself:
Christus…

A once-devout son of the Presbyterian Church, Pound has ceased to be a believer. Yet the “translucent” form of the ego that he envisions here is not one that merely flicks and falls like spray on the world-sea. Even the shallow modern self is a “sphere” that the form of Christ can somehow inhabit. In a heterodox sense (and Pound notes, here, that he is not orthodox), he still believes that Christ can live in us.

As Pound hints, Christmas is a time to remember that within us all “there glows a sphere” where Christ can live. This is a possibility, mystic or artistic, that avant-gardists were still able to celebrate in print in London and Venice circa 1910. If it seems bizarre to us now, it is only because so much cultural and spiritual ground has been lost.

For us, today, modernism is nothing more than a subversive mood in the early days of the 20th century, a youthful drive to create post-Victorian forms of expression — free verse and so on. Pound’s one-line manifesto, “Make it new”, seems to us to say it all. But we don’t even get the motto right, much less, the deeper modernist imperative.

Significantly, “Make it new” is extremely old. Pound lifted the line, in a somewhat convoluted way, from ancient texts that touch on the origins of China’s Shang dynasty. In a couple of these texts, one virtuous monarch of the 18th century BC is said to have engraved the words “Renovate, renovate!” on his washbasin. Pound then put his own translation of the Shang-dynasty dictum — “Make it new” — into circulation in the 20th century AD.

But what does this dictum mean? Pound tells us, in one remarkable poem in A Quinzaine for this Yule, that Making it new means, among other things, “giving to prayer new language”. Notice the phrasing here: giving to prayer new language, not ceasing to pray altogether.

We could surely say of Christmas, too, or yule as Pound calls it, in a Gothic vein, that we must make it new. Its truth and freshness, its imagistic light, is not simply there in the world. It is something that we must bring to the world, again and again. (Curiously, in one Gospel, Jesus says: “I am the light of the world”; in another he says, “You are the light of the world”.) Read correctly, then, modernism’s “Make it new” is in conflict with late modernism’s tendency to blur and suppress the mystical, even dogmatic, elements of our ancestral feasts. Read correctly, “Make it new” means: Celebrate the yule.

This becomes perfectly clear once we remember that modernism doesn’t just have one call to arms: “Make it new”. There are, in fact, two versions of that saying in Pound’s writings, and the earlier one is entirely his own. It is not a translation. Precisely in the years when Pound was compiling his first books of poetry, his motto read this way: “Make-strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.” The italics are his.

And that is the task, and the beauty, every Christmas. If we want there to be “peace on earth, good will toward men”, we must make-strong old dreams. If we want there to be “glory to God in the highest”, we must make-strong old dreams. And in cities like London and Venice, in Pound’s day and ours, Christmas is the oldest and brightest recurring dream of all.

The prize and its justification ignited an argument which blazed for six months: can art be separated from politics? Should the intolerant be tolerated, let alone rewarded? Should liberalism take account of the consequences of speech even as it defends the right to speak? To put in in 2020 terminology: “Should Ezra Pound be cancelled?”

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The phrase “cancel culture” might have been coined by the Devil to ensure maximum rancour and confusion. It is currently both ubiquitous and uselessly vague. The offences under its rickety umbrella range from an unguarded line in an interview to serial sexual assault; the punishments stretch from a rough week on Twitter to career annihilation; the prosecutors might be a powerful institution or a few powerless tweeters.

As if that weren’t muddled enough, the current debate is largely taking place in a state of historical amnesia, as if the issues were as novel as the terminology. The sociologist Jib Fowles called this fallacy chronocentrism: “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison”. The author and academic Philip Seargeant suggests “the narcissism of the present”.

For many progressives, this unknowing is indeed a kind of generational vanity: only we, in the early 21st century, have the moral clear-sightedness and mettle to reprimand behaviour that our predecessors let slide. There is a whole click-friendly genre of journalism dedicated to scolding “of its time” art in the tone of a disappointed schoolteacher, while oblivious to the fact that many of their points were made at the time.

For their opponents, meanwhile, chronocentrism magnifies the danger of current challenges to free speech: the mob is at the gates, the clock is ticking and the survival of liberalism itself hangs in the balance. Novelty inspires urgency. It doesn’t help them to point out that conservative writers were routinely warning against “liberal fascism” and “a new McCarthyism” 30 years ago, nor that some of them simultaneously endorsed censorship of work that offended them. Both versions of the fallacy imply that, roughly between the peak of the Enlightenment and the launch of Twitter, it was plain sailing.

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This narcissism of the present became a little grotesque in the response to last week’s instantly notorious open letter to Harper’s, ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’. Critics caricatured the signatories as a bunch of pampered, out-of-touch gatekeepers who are unaccustomed to criticism or challenge, as if decades of literary feuds, brutal reviews, boycotts and controversies had never happened.

Try telling that to Salman Rushdie, who was not only threatened with the ultimate cancellation by the Ayatollah Khomeini but had to listen to eminent figures from across the political spectrum say that, regrettable though it was, he had brought the fatwa on himself by writing the damn book in the first place, and who might therefore know a thing or two about threats to free speech. (The Algerian author Kamel Daoud has also received a fatwa.)

Other signatories, such as Noam Chomsky, Greil Marcus and Todd Gitlin, have been defending freedom of expression since the 1960s and are unlikely to draw the line at JK Rowling. Anyone disappointed by their participation hasn’t been paying attention. These people know that there are in fact worse things than being shouted at on Twitter. Most of them aren’t even on Twitter.

The Rushdie affair began in 1989, which happened to coincide with the height of the political correctness wars of the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the efforts to cancel, quite literally, works such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Ice-T’s Cop Killer — just some of the examples that made many Gen X-ers extremely antsy about censorship from any side. I was left feeling that you couldn’t decry censorship from the Right while encouraging it from the Left, or vice versa.

I have a stack of out-of-print books from the early 90s about arguments that are both half-forgotten and strikingly relevant. Take this line: “We have not abrogated anybody’s First Amendment rights. We’ve just said we don’t want any kid to be forced to read this racist trash… Anybody who teaches this book is a racist.” That was a high school administrator in 1982, talking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or this apparently timely observation: “For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech.” That was Christopher Hitchens in 1993.

Whether or not you agree with either of them, we have clearly been here before. Give me a current culture war flashpoint — no-platforming, identity politics, diversified curricula, whatever — and I’ll find you a precursor.

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This, though, is still the relatively recent past, so let’s jump back to 1915 and D. W. Griffith’s horrific masterpiece The Birth of a Nation. Nobody would now dispute that it is viciously racist but it’s essential to remember that many people thought it was viciously racist then, and tried to have it banned for inciting hatred and violence. “We are aware… that it is dangerous to limit expression, and yet, without some limitations civilization could not endure,” argued the great civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Liberals were torn, as liberals usually are,“between two desires,” wrote one journalist. “They hate injustice to the negro and they hate a bureaucratic control of thought.” Ultimately, the film remained in theatres but the protests became an inseparable part of its legacy.

The Pound affair concluded in August 1949 with a congressional decision that the Library of Congress should stay out of the business of prize-giving in future. Helpfully for us, the arguments were well-documented in the May issue of Partisan Review, which solicited opinions from half a dozen prominent thinkers, including three of the Bollingen jurors. They were all writing in the knowledge that Hitler had demonstrated the ultimate destination of dehumanising hate speech while Stalin had zombified a nation’s culture by prohibiting anything that deviated from Soviet orthodoxy, so the worst-case scenarios were more than thought experiments.

The only point upon which the writers could all agree was opposition to censorship. Karl Shapiro, one of the dissenting judges, opposed the award on the grounds that Pound’s hatreds infected his poetry, as did Irving Howe: “A hand to defend him from censors, fools and blood-seekers, yes. But a hand of honor and congratulations, no.” Clement Greenberg wrote that, as a Jew, he felt both offended and made “physically afraid” by Pound’s poetry, yet didn’t necessarily object to the prize. George Orwell thought that the judges should have asterisked their decision by mentioning Pound’s “evil” opinions. William Barrett, the magazine’s editor, derided the kind of performative ultra-liberal who celebrated the award precisely because Pound was so reprehensible:

“I am against censorship in principle even though in particular cases it might be publicly beneficial, because censorship, once invoked, is difficult to control and therefore dangerous. I think this is as far as liberalism need go… Liberalism is urged here to countenance things that deny its own right to exist — and for no other purpose but to show off. There is a kind of childishly competitive bravado in this need to show that one can out-liberal all other liberals.”

Such a person, he thought, might next try to honour “a bad poet who expresses antisemitism just in order to show how liberal he can be”.

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Although you’ll rarely find a case as clear-cut as a poetry prize for a treasonous anti-Semite, the arguments hold up. Of course, social norms change and the boundaries of acceptable opinion shift. Technology has transformed the discourse, too, by amplifying other voices (all of the writers arguing over Pound were white men) in arenas that are much noisier than the pages of Partisan Review.

More worryingly, the 1949 consensus that censorship is a line one should not cross no longer holds, nor does the assumption of good faith on the part of one’s opponents on a matter of conscience rather than partisan allegiance. Yet the fundamental disagreement about the priorities of liberalism does not feel that different from the furore around Peter Handke, a former supporter of Slobodan Milošević, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 70 years later, or the staff of Charlie Hebdo receiving an honour from PEN after 10 of their colleagues were murdered in 2015. No case sets an iron precedent; the central conundrum is never resolved.

One positive outcome of the recent furore over statues was much greater awareness of the history of slavery, imperialism and why certain monuments were erected in the first place, but it has still been framed, for the most part, as an argument between the present and the past: the enlightened living versus the dead racists.

I think we could all benefit from learning more about the history of arguments themselves. Evan Smith’s No Platform, for example, explains how restrictions on campus speech have been hotly contested for almost half a century. Helen Lewis’s Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights tells a story of friction — sometimes productive, sometimes not — rather than unanimity and takes care to resurface thorny pioneers who have fallen out of the historical narrative. Lewis quotes James Baldwin: “I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

By paying our forerunners the respect of acknowledging that they thrashed out many of the same issues of conflicting rights as us, we can remind ourselves that these dilemmas aren’t going to be resolved in a hurry, nor do they have to be. We are neither the first nor the last nor the most important. Years from now, when “woke” and “cancel culture” are rusting on the lexical scrapheap, these arguments will still be raging and perhaps a subsequent chronocentric generation will have forgotten that we cared enough to have these fights, too.