Everyone knows these lines:
"Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well."
Now, I disagree with him: I'm not inclined to pardon Kipling, say, or Celine, or Claudel. We all have our lists. I have an incredibly complicated relationship to Jeffers... he was a right bastard, as the English say, and his politics are just to the right of Genghis Khan. I wouldn't argue with anyone who says we shouldn't read him, and yet I do read him, sometimes with pleasure. Is this simply because he's a California poet, or because I liked him in my youth? I don't know.
But I *am* interested in why we pardon some, and not others. Some curse Stevens because of his deathbed conversion to Catholicism: "See, I told you, he didn't mean any of it!" Berryman's impossible to defend, and I could never teach Colloquy at Black Rock to a class.
But why the special hate for Pound? Yeats and Eliot had very similar politics. If you want to find some pretty savage antisemitism, you don't have to look very deep into Eliot. And Yeats was a fascist (and a sexist) of the first order. Eliot was so ashamed of himself he gave up poetry completely not long after the war, and did little else but verse dramas (try reading those someday, if you think the Cantos are bad!).
And since Pound was so right wing, why does the left defend him, and the right curse him? The same is true for Eliot and Yeats, although to a slightly lesser extent. Of the three, only Yeats gets much love on this site, and even that's fairly rare. Why would poets who are broadly inclined to the right bear such aversion to poets who are also broadly inclined to the right?
I don't have an answer. But I do have a guess, and I think it has to do with one's predisposition to Modernism itself. Leftists tend to like Modernism, even though its main poets were right leaning. Rightists tend to dislike Modernism, with the same irony attached. They attack the easiest of the three, without acknowledging their broad brush tends to splatter over the work of the other two.
Yes, he was likely at least a little nuts, especially later on. But nobody curses Snodgrass for his late fascination with the Nazis... instead, we ignore it, and focus on Heart's Needle. To be consistent, shouldn't we use the same broad brush? And why do I praise Heidegger's thought so highly, even though I know what he did, and that he wasn't sorry for doing it? Shouldn't I be consistent? And while we're on that subject, why would anyone who's not wildly on the left praise Whitman? And yet even William James fell all over himself when talking about the good grey poet.
It's all a troubling question, and the more I look at it, the more it seems like I'm gazing into a funhouse mirror.
Best,
Bill
(ps. I can't help but notice that all my examples here are masculine. So one last one: why don't we see these same kind of arguments in women's poetics?)
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