Reading with fascination some notes of Randall Jarrell talking of Pound:

From http://www.bris.ac.uk/thumbscrew/thum_rev.html#burt

"The Pound affair has been, as a whole, a terrible parody of He that is
without sin among you - a parody in which Christ's hearers end by seriously
and righteously throwing stones upon the guilty woman. Even to somebody who
thought Pound's politics crazy, his poetry must have seemed tempered by
occasional flashes of charm and genius. ... Most people felt so
extraordinary an interest in Pound's case because here at last was an
aesthetic question, a matter of art, from which the art could be almost
wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality. Our time
has been neither widely nor deeply interested in art - it preferred works of
art secondhand, in criticism, and told the artist that he was saved or
damned, truly employed, only as he belonged to a party, a church, or the
Parents-Teachers' Association - but it has been obsessively interested in
politics and in the sort of public morality which consists mainly of
unfavorable judgements about other people's political statements. If Pound
had murdered his wife and son, cheated his friends of their savings,
repudiated every moral or aesthetic principle he possessed, and then been
executed by the Italian government for his part in a conspiracy against
Mussolini, he would now be remembered as an anti-Fascist martyr whose life
had been blemished by certain personal failings. And he would still be, from
time to time, the subject of violent attacks by [right-wing newspaper
columnist] W[estbrook] Pegler and Senator McCarthy. Our time said: Tell me a
man's politics and I will tell you what he is ; which is another way of
saying I have no interest in what he is - this Man of yours is a hypothesis
I have no need for . "Politics is death," said Nijinsky - who was insane;
"Politics is destiny," said Napoleon to Goethe, and his statement has been
admiringly repeated every since, to end in Mann's monumental-statuary
paraphrase: "In our time the destiny of man finds its expression in
political terms." What a destiny! what an expression! For the artist, for a
"private man" - and in what matters most to us we are necessarily private
men - Napoleon's statement is more insane than Nijinsky's; and today who has
not begun to see in Nijinsky's words a certain elementary empirical truth?

....

"If in Pound's political life, in his obsessions with politics, he was
foolish and immoral, in rest of his life he was not tho' he was often
exaggerated and absurd; about as objective meo, but generous, brave,
reckless, sincere, indefatigable in efforts for everything he thought good -
had so much influence on poets that knew him precisely because they knew it
was not an envious competitor of theirs speaking, but somebody so eager for
well-being of Poetry that he was delighted in the [well-being] of the poet -
exact opposite of one of my favorite living poets, whom I once heard speak
of Shelley's running around with other men's wives in order, in his
jealousy, to discredit Shelley with that audience.

"If you ever meet Pound there's something sympathetic and appealing, a
gentleness and delicacy, under all fireworks, so you can see how Yeats,
Eliot and all the rest were able to be affected by him as they were. [He
c]omes off worst if we take a Buddhist attitude, and count ignorant mistakes
as sin; he was too much of an enthusiast, too little able to reason or get
the distance from a thing that objectivity requires, ever to be correct
about many things outside of poetry. Perpetual revolutionist; and if he took
all his examples of what he wanted from the past, if he said it was the past
his revolution was returning, would return us to, surely no one is so
foolish as to believe there was ever any past like that; those highly
selected jewels of interest seen through a glass brightly - through one of
the brightest of all glasses, Ezra Pound."




Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com