[Andrew Frisardi]

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.

[Gregory Dowling]

So you knew Peter Russell, Andrew. That’s fascinating. I have a number of friends in Venice who remember him well. I attended a reading he gave once, on a return visit to the city, and found him very engaging.

And there are, of course, many people here who remember Pound well, and many of them with affection. Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, has devoted her life to promoting her father’s works and translating them into Italian, and she rents out the house he lived in near the Zattere to Pound scholars. She is horrified by the use that CasaPound has made of her father’s name, although it can’t be said that they are entirely wrong in so appropriating it.

There are a number of poets, whose works I respect, who are devoted to Pound. Clive Wilmer is one such person. Donald Davie another. I remain somewhat baffled.

On Pound in St. Elizabeth’s the last word must go to Elizabeth Bishop, of course.

[Gregory Dowling]

This review of the Posthumous Cantos is worth taking a look at. Massimo Bacigalupo is a very eminent figure in Pound scholarship here in Italy; interesting to see that he knew Pound as a boy.

[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks, Gregory and Andrew, for your informative and informed posts. "Humane equanimity," a valuable commodity! I met Omar Pound when I was in graduate school. He was an unpretentious man who cordially encouraged any interest in Pound's work.

Here is the Bishop poem. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237932