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Hi - Jaime,


I am glad you decided to finish the email!


Your comments below prompted two thoughts:


First, that the poetry of Cathay on its own (if Pound had written no more) would, probably, have left Pound with the status of an interesting minor poet, writing in a mode insufficiently cut free from Victorianism.


Secondly, I was reminded of Steven Yao's suggestion that Pound was an important precursor for American Chinese poets: Yao compares Pound's response to China and Chinese culture with the dominant representation of both in the period as 'the yellow peril' ...



Robert 

From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 06 March 2018 18:01:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect
 
Well, Robert, you beat me to several points I was going to comment on, but as I was half way through this email, I’ll finish it and send it on anyway! 

Thinking about Pound (who, and whose work, has mostly faded from my mind) I find him a concise, near iconic, representative of the argument of the difference between form and content. Sonically, he is too fin-de-siècle for me to think of as a modern poet; I attach his own poetry to the 19th century. He was absolutely dead-on when he cited Eliot as being a modern writer, the first of what he implied was the beginning of a cultural movement. And I think he may have been seen as part of that world, and a relatively minor part of that world if not for the following facts of his life:

his extraordinarily prodigious output, which augments his presence by its sheer mass;
his work as an editor, which as a tireless promoter of certain writers’ work helped define a cultural shift within writing, especially American writing;
his editorial brilliance, shown most clearly in the detailed editing of Eliot’s Wasteland, but which affected most of the writers he was friends with;
his drive to create new forms, which is shown in the experimental Cantos, which like many experiments is rickety;
his appropriation of different cultures’ varying forms and the overlaying of them (such as the ideogrammatic form taken from his misunderstanding of Chinese and used as a form in individual poems of The Cantos.

These things alone would have secured him a place in poetry’s history, I believe, and they are almost entirely separate from what can be read as content. His place as a historical force within poetry was also amplified by his winning the Bollingen Prize in 1948 for the Pisan Cantos, which threw him onto the front pages of the NY Times and stirred massive controversy. Showing once again that any publicity, even bad publicity, is good. He was also championed by Hugh Kenner in the 1960s, who was conservative in his politics though not, I believe, a fascist.

His politics, his content, are deplorable politically and economically. Reading over the description of Casa Pound I am struck by its mission to move fascism into the left as well as the right. Casa Pound supports same-sex marriage, abortion, and the improvement of the welfare state. These issues are traditionally (if that word can be used in such a short span of time) supported by the left. Their overlap with the right and extreme populist movements is over immigration and race. 

Looking at my country’s current political situation I can only hope that neither that nor Pound’s lunatic politics and racism do not become the norm. It’s enough to drive a girl to prayer…..

J






______________________________

QS: Let’s return to poetics.
JR: When did we leave?

—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager





On Mar 6, 2018, at 9:20 AM, Hampson, R <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear David,

You could set against this the failure of the Cantos to cohere...

I think we are in agreement that Eliot is racist (and we could add classist) - and a political authoritarian fantasist. I assume part of the difference for you (this might be a wrong assumption) is that Eliot was not actively supporting il Duce. But that seems quite a fine line between racist political authoritarian fantasy and fascism ....


Robert   
From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 06 March 2018 07:25:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect
 
Yes, Robert, but Eliot's interest was in a failed Coriolanus, rather than a real Duce, which makes for interesting poetry. Eliot was most definitely racist, vide his speeches at Harvard in 30s, and a political authoritarian fantasist, but he was most definitely NOT a fascist. 

best

David

On 5 March 2018 at 23:40, Hampson, R <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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]AC.UK> on behalf of Sean Carey <00000758a731f3ca-dmarc-[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 05 March 2018 23:24:59
To: [log in to unmask]AC.UK
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

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On Monday, 5 March 2018, Tim Allen <0000002899e7d020-dmarc-[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.