I think Dominic's picture of the position Pound in The Cantos tends to push
the reader towards is very apt. That the 'facts' are half-baked doesn't
matter, you (the reader) will damn well listen. Recalling it was a citation
of Marjorie Perloff's claim that Pound's achievement was to bring back prose
information into poetry I wonder if it takes a life in academe to become so
desensitized to the relation of writing and reality as to posit as bringer
of information a poet who made propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Axis.
It isn't, pace Roger, that regard Pound as a poet as morally wanting, it's
that I find his method as a poet compromised by his prejudices masquerading
as beliefs.
Roger mentions Pound's attachment to a forgotten economist, he wasn't the
only one, Hugh MacDiarmid likewise espoused the theories of Major
C.H.Douglas, in the Thirities a lot of people floundered about for economic
salvation. But Pound went too far with Il Duce, and his politics were a
consequence or concomitant of his aesthetics.
This was a contemporary reaction, from Homage to Ezra Pound, written during
the war years, by Gilbert Highet:
"And his temper was never good, you get eccentric living in
Rapallo and loving
BEAUTY
the emperor is at Ko
but No
silken strings shiver no longer, clashing of smilax, dark
nuts on the dry bough, nuts on wet earth, nuts
it's lonesome, too, being the only one who understands
Caius Propertius,
'Alkaios,
Li Pu,
all great guys
....
sure Ezra loved 'em:
the lover of third-rate loving fascist Italia e l'IMPERO
pfft
the bogus aristocrat wanting Discipline and No Lower Classes
So Ezra attacked the ole USA and pluto-bolsho-Britain
Jews, & negroes, & Roosevelt, & armaments trusts, & usurers
melodious pipe-swill for Goebells
(Frank Sullivan says Gayda is the only newspaperman that
can write the way a Pekinese barks ... He shd read Ezra's
XIVth Canto ...
tender ...
like a centaur's asphodel ...)
On 31/03/2008, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Pound was fascinated by facts, compelled by their factishness, but never
> too rigorous with them. I forget the exact phrase G. Hill uses about the
> Homage to Sextius Propertius - it's something like "a farrago of
> poker-faced misreadings" ("in flagrant delight" for "in flagrante
> delicto", etc.), except it wasn't "farrago". The air of knowing, of
> having delved into all sorts of wordly things, is essential to Pound.
> But it's a studied imposture; he wasn't a scholar, and wasn't really
> pretending to be. The scholar ultimately refers you to his sources,
> dispersing the glamour of knowledge among footnotes. Pound always sounds
> as if he's the first person since the ancients to really know *anything*
> about his subject.
>
> The "fact" in the cantos is there to bring the imagination to attention.
> Like any crank, Pound wants to wield the ultimate conversation-stopper
> that will reduce all quibbles to rubble. "What about those thermite
> sparks coming out of the South tower, then, how do you explain *those*"?
> The onus is pushed back towards the reader: what do you, dear fellow,
> know about banks and credit? Now sit still and listen while I explain
> how these things really work...
>
>
> Dominic
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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