Lots of fine stuff in this thread, but Gregory’s post #30 citing Wilbur’s essay seems to me particularly wonderful. How great is Wilbur? I was delighted to find him faulting the Cantos for being “supremely tactless,” because it has always struck me that Wilbur’s own poetry shows extraordinary aesthetic tact. & then his explanation of Pound’s tactlessness is devastating: that it seems to derive “from a despair of any community.” And then, as a coup de grace, the concession that the Cantos have, after all, found a community: namely, that of academics who, “over a period of years,” have read up on all of Pound’s sources, & have thereby achieved a “misshapen” learning & an “air of lost identity.” This is a bit malicious, but it cuts deep, & is very funny.
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”: this seems to have been a rather overwhelming dynamic in the early part of the last century, around WWI time. The conservative turn of the modernist poets was a natural defense-mechanism under the circumstances. But Pound seems to have become untethered. He was lavishly gifted, lavishly generous, but evidently with an insufficient center of gravity, i.e., conscience. He scolded himself after the war for having fallen for the vulgar old error of anti-semitism—not for having been morally wrong, but for having been stupid & gauche. Conscience at one remove.
The list of important writers Pound became constructively involved with in the early modernist years is amazing. A counter-factual scenario of a world without Pound might seem somewhat depleted. The positive energy was significant. The critical intelligence evident in his editing of “The Waste Land” was a major achievement, arguably.
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem seems to me to strike a good balance between antipathy & appreciation. To come down, whole hog, on one side or the other, is tactless, or should we say, ideological. To fully engage with the brilliant & fucked-up reality of the man is humanizing, potentially. Always a useful exercise.
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