Great post, Gregory. The humane equanimity of Richard Wilbur is something Pound sorely lacked. However, the Housman example doesn’t address the question of what place there is in modern poetry for epic scope and encyclopedic content. Pound’s references are centrifugal because we lack unity of culture, and he mistakenly thought that epic-scale poetry was possible simply through juxtaposition and compilation.
Also, whatever one thinks about Pound or his poetry, he sure had a huge influence on some very good poets. An old Milanese poet I know, a Communist Party member from way back, and his parents were in the thick of the Resistance, nonetheless loves and emulates Pound. Go figure. Then again, there’s a neofascist organization, based in Rome, called
CasaPound. A polarizing figure if there ever was one in po-biz.
About ten years ago I became friends with an old English poet living in Tuscany, Peter Russell, who’d known Pound well in his last years in Venice. Peter founded a journal in the late 1940s and ’50s called
Nine, which published Graves, Cummings, Tom Scott, Allen Tate, Edith Sitwell, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, and others, with Pound’s ideas about poetry having a lot to do with it. William Cookson’s
Agenda was a spinoff of it. Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott . . . The list is long.
I did an interview with Peter in which he talked a bit about Pound’s anti-Semitism. Admirers of Pound do gloss over the nasty bits, and Peter was no exception, but I have never had the impression that Pound was an incarnation of evil. An arrogant rank blowhard who said some stupid and evil things, but not “evil” as I take that word.
There’s a story that when he was in St. Elizabeth’s, some poets came to visit him with a young guy who was about to go off to be a soldier in Vietnam. When they left, Pound said to the kid, “God be with you . . . if you can stand the company.” For me, that combination of wit, cheekiness, and off-the-cuff profundity captures something of the good of Pound the man.