I thought Auden's "conversion" was post-WW2?
Pound was barking mad, complete with trip to an insane asylum, and all
the anxieties of his age visited upon twice-fold but he was generous
to a fault. He was in the thick of it, though, in that period of
ferment and fizz. Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, Surrealists.
Actually, the left-wing slant that Surrealism got only happened
*after* Breton got politics. Hans Belmer - now there really was a
deeply unpleasant person but he seemed to channel the despair and rage
of the Weimar republic.
Pound's poetry when it flies, really does fly.
He wasn't particularly rich, he had a small income as they say, and he
supplemented it by re-cycling articles and reviews, which always
amused me.
Aleister Crowley was another one of the age - even though he wasn't a
poet - I always read with amazement the blood he drips across his age.
Chanting at the golden. wot.
Roger
On 7/15/08, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > You really did a bad one, you know, summoning
> > up the ghost of EP ...
> >
>
> Could be worse, could'a mentioned Casement.
>
> <g>
>
> R.
>
> I think, of all the rightwing poetic pricks swanning around the early part
> of the early 20thC -- Eliot, Yeats, the Later Auden, among others -- Pound
> was easily the nicest person.
>
> Totally barking mad, but he wote the best poems.
>
> That has to mean something ...
>
> R.
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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