Too late to respond to a critique of Ezra Pound so I’m writing this apologia and blog entry. Let’s chalk it up to the cause of not seeing things entirely in black and white—a nice reminder in the age of agent orange.
Won’t excuse the rotten bastard, but it does seem strange that EP, il miglior fabbro, is seldom taught (and then only his early work) at the Academy and TSE often. (Perhaps it’s the fact that Pound’s Cantos are full of anti-capitalism—his fascism notwithstanding--and Eliot was a Tory, esp. since Eliot also was a bigot—read Burbank with a Baedeker, if you doubt me.
Pound admired the essential Marxist critique, but felt that it was impossible for the masses (the ones who had been exploited by the capitalists) to rise up against their oppressors. Experience is the worst teacher. The abused learn to become abusers. That is why he felt only a strong man (like Muss...) could stop the capitalists. Of course this is where the disease steps in. Why the downtrodden whites elected Trump—why E.P. became an anti-semite and a totalitarian—despite his sincere praise of democracy. He should’ve known better, but the illness was so emotionally and sociopathically cathected that he could not extricate himself from his own inferno. He wanted a socialist democracy whose goal was the production of beauty, but he was hoist on his own petard.
So you are right to damn Ezra’s eyes and I will NOT let him off the hook, since even in the best sequences you find phrases your gorge rises at. But I feel compelled to advocate a run of poetry beginning with the sublime flow in the Pisan and moving on across the steps of ideograms all the way to the end of the Cantos—where the great one—yes I still think so--apologizes for himself:
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.