Bill, I think you're onto something with the troubled connection between leftism and modernism. I've often wondered why I'm not more bothered by the far-right politics of Eliot and Yeats (whom I admire far more than Pound). I think it's because I tend to take one poem at a time rather than one poet at a time. In the long run, poets are probably less important than they think. Most poets survive as a name associated with a handful of poems.
I think of mature Pound (ca. World War I) as a great style that rarely found a worthy substance. I re-read Canto II from time to time; it has a distinctive beauty, full of the musicality that Pound called "melopoeia," a beauty of assonance, consonance and tempo that reappears sometimes in the free verse of Basil Bunting and Robert Duncan. I also admire the anti-war sections of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (IV-V). But a handful of Pound poems are enough for me.
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