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Black and white thinking would amount to saying that Pound could not have
been a poet.

Cheers,
Luke

On 5 March 2018 at 15:24, Jamie McKendrick <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I’m just hoping my comments on the other thread won’t be read as ‘black
> and white retrospective moralising’. I’ve been trying to write something on
> Giorgio Bassani and the Jewish community of Ferrara, a Fascist stronghold
> during the Thirties till 1945, so inevitably, in starkest contrast, what
> Pound in the same period thought he was up to and if he really thought
> about it, has been on my mind.
>    Though Bassani is primarily known as a novelist he’s also a
> considerable poet and addresses matters such as the Racial Laws in his
> poems as well as in the six book of the Romanzo. The testimony of Jewish
> poets such as Saba and Fortini needs to be considered beside the prose of
> Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg and others, for all of whom politics were a
> matter of life and death.
> Jamie
>
> *From:* Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
> *Sent:* Monday, March 05, 2018 2:00 PM
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: BRITISH-IRISH-POETS Digest - 3 Mar 2018 to 4 Mar 2018
> (#2018-75)
>
> 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.
>
>
>