Yes I agree with this too. It is strange but in some ways I tend to be more critical of Eliot because of this escape into myth, insofar as we are talking about the poetry and not the personalities. I suppose my objection to what I called 'retrospective black and white moralising' is that I don't know at what point it is supposed to start and end - we end up by cherry-picking (current in term) our concerns according to the nature of the original sin, which is always relative to the way we think about things in the here and now.

Cheers

Tim

On 5 Mar 2018, at 23:40, Hampson, R wrote:

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