[John Whitworth]

Has anyne mentioned Caravaggio. Perhaps I did earlier on. Not only was he an incomparably greater artist than poor old Ezra, a secnd-rater if ever there was one, he was also a murderer and, the sin of sins these days, an abuser of children. Then there was Ben Jonson, a favourite of mine, a murderer who got off because he could read and write and indeed speak Latin rather better than Ezra..

Eiot, Yeats et al are not to the point. None of them betrayed their country in time of war.

Norman, I do not believe in any money sysyem without the use of usury, if tby that you mean the ability to buy and sell money like any other commodity. Perhaps it is money itself you need to abolish. But then, even under a barter system, corn right now would be worth more than corn next year, wouldn't it? Perhaps.like Marx and Jeremy Corbyn, you should seek to abolish abolish private property. The state is God walking on earth. Who said that?

I always understood it was Bismarck. My history teacher told me so.

[Ann Drysdale]

Sorry. Smart-arse comment deleted.

[Bill Carpenter]

John,
Very glad to have your views on Ezra Pound. I don't know if you will disagree with his message to the English in 1942: "Nothing can save you, save an affirmation that you are English."

His view of the war as a hideous pointless wasteful continuation of the Great War was shared by many. Robinson Jeffers, who is not as good a poet as Pound, wrote against the war and praised Hitler's defiance, as that of a wolf brought down by dogs. Pound's cynical view of Churchill was shared by many contemporaries. David Irving represents the continuing life of that view of the war and Churchill. Pound should have gone home and attempted to persuade people by talking and writing in the U.S. and going to jail if convicted of a crime. Making the same broadcasts on behalf of a declared enemy government he should have been tried as a traitor. We don't know what the verdict would have been or even if he would actually have been prosecuted. The hospitalization looks like an evasion in which all parties connived.

"Definite second-rater...". Why are we wasting our breath? I think you are a proponent of a literary history in which the successfully promoted project of Modernism must be re-evaluated according to a "juster" view of its actual accomplishments. Inthat history Pound is more a propagandist than a poet, someone whose career, like Wilde's, looms larger than his artistic achievements. Like Blake, he has many fine small poems, and colossally flopped on his large scale life's work. I have gotten far more enjoyment out of Masefield's Reynard, King Cole, and Dauber than from Cantos, and I would rather reread the Old Front Line than anything Pound has to say about WWI. Eliot's two great poems are not necessarily a much bigger deal than the Cantos, though they are better short bursts than anything to be found in the 800 page tome. I think Pound and Williams are much on a level. (But if you think the Cantos are unreadable, check out Maximus poems, which show where you will go if you follow Pound's lead!). In our time Fred Turner has written real epics that are successful essays in the form, pleasurable to read, and weighty in content, which you could only say of the Cantos if they had been done very differently than they were.

Maybe Pound is a commanding image of the will to power in the literary sphere -- a proponent of Shelley's dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. We flatter him because he flatters us. To your credit, and to the credit of others who share your contempt, the One Ring holds no attraction for you. But as Tony indicated, he wanted the ring to do good.

I profit from your views of literary history (i.e., reading recommendations) that you drop from time to time. I should no doubt be more circumspect on all these subjects, but I write in hope of eliciting more interesting responses. Bill

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Bill,
Placing Jeffers views so easily alongside Pound's open promotion of fascism is IMO a false note. Here is Jeffers on Hitler's sick child soul:

This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice.
A man of genius: that is, of amazing
Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child’s soul,
Heard clearly through the dog-wrath, a sick child
Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it.
Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon
A south wind like a blast from hell’s mouth spilled a slight rain
On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake
Danced the house, no harm done. To-night I have been amusing myself
Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly
Into black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder.
Well: the day is a poem: but too much
Like one of Jeffers’s, crusted with blood and barbaric omens,
Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.

Added in :Not that Jeffers wasn't often wrong but that his view was more complex than your note there would indicate. When he wrote the worst of his bits on Hitler, I think he wrote from an isolation unaware of the camps and such but regardless, it came from a misanthropic distaste for all human State endeavors. Maybe wrong-headed but IMO not related to Pound and Irving.

[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks for your reply and the poem, Andrew. I don't have that poem. I was looking at Tragedy has Obligations. No doubt there are distinctions to be made, but they are along a continuum with respect to the war. As for favoring fascism, you are right there is not much of a comparison but I think Pound saw fascism as a means of recovering self-government, which gets back to my original question -- how could he?

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are two comparables to use in valuing the Cantos.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Here is the other poem by Jeffers, should anyone be missing it. I think it has some brilliant subtleties more degrading of Hitler than it might seem at first. But clearly I have a deep respect for Jeffers.

I do think this is related to the Pound-ing. Thanks for making me think about it Bill.

June, 1943

If you had thrown a little more boldly in the flood of fortune
You’d have had England; or in the slackening
Less boldly, you’d not have sunk your right hand in Russia: these
Are the two ghosts; they stand by the bed
And make a man tear his flesh. The rest is fatal; each day
A new disaster, and at last Vae Victis,
It means Weh den Gesiegten. This is the essence of tragedy,
To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate,
All stone, approach.

But tragedy has obligations. A choice
Comes to each man when his days darken:
To be tragic or to be pitiful. You must do nothing pitiful.
Suicide, which no doubt you contemplate,
Is not enough, suicide is for bankrupt shopkeepers.
You should be Samson, blind Samson, crushing
Al his foes, that’s Europe, America, half Asia, in his fall.
But you are not able; and the tale is Hebrew.

I have seen a wing-broken hawk, standing in her own dirt,
Helpless, a caged captive, with cold
Indomitable eyes of disdain, meet death. There was nothing pitiful,
No degradation, but eternal defiance.
Or a sheepfold harrier, a grim, grey wolf, hunted all day,
Wounded, struck down at the turn of twilight,
How grandly he dies. The pack whines in a ring and not closes,
The head lifts, the great fangs grin, the hunters
Admire their victim. That is how you should end — for the prophesied
You would die like a dog — like a wolf, war-loser.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

And Norman. Not losing the weight of your observations, especially regarding the present burning of the forests. Just don't know what to say that isn't a milk-toast vow under the circumstances.

[W.F. Lantry]

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?)

[Michael Juster]

Seriously, there is no comparison between Eliot and Yeats' occasional anti-Semitic remarks/writings and Pound regularly and enthusiastically shilling for the fascists with rants against "the butcher Jews" at the very time that the fascists were accelerating their slaughter of six million Jews. Seriously, that's like equating a middle school bully with a serial killer.

[Kyle Norwood]

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.