Just to pitch in -- and I think I'm mostly with dave and Doug here, having
encountered Pound in my teens, among other things -- I've always found
Pound's antisemitism less of a problem than Eliot's. It's part and parcel
with the Major Douglas economics nonsense (which, as dave pointed out, Pound
shared with MacDiarmid, another poet who was, later in his career, intent on
incoporating prose into his poetry) but begins to shove itself to the fore
relatively late, and is usually accompanied by a catastophic collapse in the
quality of the poetry. Reading the Cantos, I simply yawn and skip when
Pound begins to rant, as he shifts from chiselled lyricism to bar-room
boredom in the space of a line.
(Boy, wouldn't Pound just have loved the Comment Is Free section of the
Guardian Online!)
But Eliot's antisemitism, and other nasty aspects of his ideas, are deeply
rooted in his aesthetic -- "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"
modulates into the Sweeney poems and (for me) infects virtually everything
Eliot does in the quatrain form.
Pound seems to me simply silly, sometimes; Eliot leaves a bad taste in my
mouth.
As to modernism and traditionalism (or parochialism), I think Scotland
avoided the worst effects of the Larkin/Movement fiasco as we had
MacDiarmid's Golden Lyric period as an alternative model to Palgrave's
Golden Emasculated Treasury. To me, nothing Larkin did was much more than
Thomas Hardy watered down for easy digestion. The closest correspondence to
Hardy in the USA would be Robert Frost, but there's a tradition behind Hardy
and running on from him that I think doesn't apply in the same way to Frost.
Before Hardy, there's Clare and a raft of authentically rural poets. Before
Frost, who? Longfellow on one side, John Crowe Ransom on the other, and
neither really feeding into Frost. The two traditions map as awkwardly one
on the other as do English and Japanese.
Not just alphabetic vs ideographic but
alphabet/syllabic/idiograph/idioglyph.
Like the problem of the relation of fully inflected Romany to Anglo-Romany.
I was going to say something about Hal's apparent confusion of semantics
with syntax, in his attempt -- or was this a joke, Hal? -- to deny Candice's
concisely put point that English is a Germanic Language. But perhaps I'd
better not go there.
<g>
Robin
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: Pound/Modernism; was draft
> There are many poets who accept modernism but have reservations about
> Pound. His fortunes with public acceptance were mixed, as is the case
> for no end of writers. He did have difficulties finding publishers for
> early versions of The Cantos but even among avant-garde writers there
> was uncertainty about them (Joyce thought The Cantos unreadable while
> Pound considered Finnegans Wake unintelligible. Or the other way
> round, I can't recall which). Yet at the outset of his career his
> early books were reviewed in publications like the Times Literary
> Supplement. It was the varied output of his most productive period,
> roughly 1912 -19, that gave the most impetus to other writers, it was
> a time too when Pound's better qualities as man were at the foremost.
> As for the issue of British poets and modernism, the answers (and
> questions) are too many for me to even want to expatiate on here:
> Larkin's reasons in the 1950's might not be the same as, say, Simon
> Armitage's today. It's worth pointing out that in North America there
> have been and are poets who pursue a kind of populist line that has
> nothing to do with modernism and there is a corresponding readership
> for them. There has also been, for complex historical and social
> reasons, a resistance in some parts of British intellectual life to
> anything that smacks of theory: 'No Isms Please, We're British'.
> My own attitude towards the Pound of The Cantos now stand at this:
> they is best read as if the writings of a fictional character.
> It's the only way I can negotiate the problems raised by the
> relationship between his politics and his aesthetics (which can't be
> brushed aside) and it makes coherent the otherwise doubtfulness of a
> work in which brilliance and garrulousness, musicality and stylistic
> disjointedness, jostle together in a heap.
> It also stops him invading my head: he is not a pleasant presence within.
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