At 11:03 AM 1/8/00 +0100, Alexander Schmitz wrote:
>Peter,
>
>
>the POVND was designed by Guy Davenport.
>& THAT shd explain it.
 
Another reason it seems appropriate for Pound: a century ago, the preferred
architectural style for banks in the United States was Beaux Arts, complete
with fake Roman lettering on the architrave. Now if only Pound had
published in the literary journal whose masthead used to proclaim itself
the Virginia Qvarterly Revievv. . . .
 
Speaking of architecture, though: do you suppose there's a student paper
waiting to be written about Pound's vision of the Tempio and Yeats's vision
(in the _Autobiographies_) of New York's Pennsylvania Station? Under
Mussolini, Art Deco modernism thrived, but (so far as I can recall offhand)
it doesn't seem to have made much of an impression on Pound. On the other
hand, the poet of Celtic Twilight nostalgia understood a great work of
modern architecture when he saw it. The demolition of Pennsylvania Station
in 1963 was one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in American
history, and after reading the _Autobiographies_ you can easily imagine
Yeats protesting.
 
But Pound was alive at the time, and he didn't protest. Of course he was
old and sick by then, and he had been long gone in every way from his own
country. And we shouldn't try to reason from a negative. Still, I think
Pound's sense of the architectonic is different from Yeats's or Eliot's,
and maybe that difference could be thought of as a defining characteristic.
It might help us see one of Pound's dimensions a little more clearly.
 
Qvesto e divertente.
 
Jonathan Morse