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For me, coming to Pound in the late 60s, part of the interest was precisely the fact that the fascism was inescapable. With Pound, any engagement with the Cantos had to be in the light of his fascism - whereas with Eliot and Yeats, the way they were taught, the material available on them, there were all kinds of escape routes into myth and symbol - avoidances of the political - despite, for example, Eliot's interest in Corioloanus. The volume Pound/Olson was instructive: Olson's visits to St Elizabeth's and his efforts to negotiate the poetry and the politics. I can't imagine teaching Pound without mentioning his anti-semitism and fascism. Robert ________________________________ From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Sean Carey <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 05 March 2018 23:24:59 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect but those who teach his work should not avoid his activities during World War Two or up until his death. To gloss over Pound’s words & deeds is to let the dead and wounded down in a macro war that killed millions. As the memories of WW2 fade from the folk memory the lessons of it all are also being lost. Our species sank to depths of depravity & brutality which surfaced again in the Balkans. Then on Europe’s shores are the graves of those trying to flee the Syrian war & in The Med their bones lie under the sea. To look at various nations in Europe the popular mood veers to populism with Britain or Ireland no exceptions. We have failed the refugees with our inability to embrace the suffering masses in a crisis. The endless surge of hard right parties air brushed and well funded has denied our hopes of ‘constant progress’. The Ezra Pound that promoted racial & religous hatred is indeed beyond punishment but his work must not be taught out of context. To make no stance on Pound is to avoid his behaviour as as ‘of its time’. World War One did not become an object lesson or ‘the war to end all wars’. Instead we ended up with another war that spread well beyond Europe all over again. What emerged from the Italian elections yesterday is sobering & worrying & we must not assume it will never happen overhere. There is no point in championing Paul Celan while teaching Ezra Pound on the same literary platform. Casa Pound have brought home to us the risks of not imposing a moral basis in our views on Ezra. We do it in other areas of thought & discourse & must not let Pound off the hook. sc Sent from AOL Mobile Mail Get the new AOL app: mail.mobile.aol.com<http://mail.mobile.aol.com> On Monday, 5 March 2018, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: I mostly agree with this Peter. I think people tend to forget the mental demolishing that WW1 caused among intellectuals - and for every one that went one way (left) another went right. Despite my own lefty politics I have never gone in for black and white retrospective moralising. Cheers Tim On 5 Mar 2018, at 01:07, Peter Riley wrote: To put it as briefly as possible: a number of European intellectuals artists and writers engaged with fascism including anti-semitism in the 1920s and early 1930s. If you look at their birth dates and careers most of them had been directly involved in the 1914-18 war and had recognised it as the worst thing that had ever happened, and as a result of this unbelievable, soul-destroying experienced knew that it must never happen again. Lewis blamed the drift of European philosophy in the first decade of the century towards the validation of instinct (rather than either reason or emotion) for the 14-18 war. From the information received at the time German national socialism seemed like an offer of stability and an alternative to a mounting global instinctive primitivism and thus might assure peace. They were wrong, of course, as they mostly soon realised, and retracted and withdrew. To treat these errors as simply pieces of nastiness for which they must be for ever punished, is very unrealistic.