[log in to unmask] wrote:

> it may be that the progrom against Pound is having its effect.  how else can
> one explain Carrol Cox's startling conclusion that, even though he has
> (apparently) enjoyed reading the Cantos for more than 45 years, he could not,
> "under current social/political conditions ... in honesty recommend to a
> young person that they devote much time to it."  what a telling remark!  are
> we to assume from this that young people of today are incapable, over a life
> of reading, to differentiate between Pound the fascist and Pound the poet?

Readers of Pound should strive for precision in their words -- and to note
precision in others. In this case note how tortured was the sentence which
he quotes from me. When I wish to be blunt I can be. I did *not* say that
I would discourage anyone from reading Pound. I did not say that the poem
was a bad poem -- much to the contrary. I did not say that immense awards
could not come from reading it -- quite the contrary: one does not read (and
yes with delight) a poem for 45 years unless one finds much in it to reward
effort. So this statement hardly adds up to a "Program" against Pound or
his poem. I did not even say anything against Pound the person -- humans
are complex, and both from the poem and accounts of Pound's life it is
easy to recognize much that is admirable in the man as in his poem. And
I certainly would not urge anyone *not* to read the poem, or refuse to
aid them if they chose to read it.

But urge someone to read it? There are time constraints. Perhaps today
with a large body of criticism extant it is easier to get into the poem than
it was in the mid '50s; perhaps other reasons also operate today to make
the poem less time consuming for the beginning reader. But my experience
is that in the last 20 years racism (and other "isms" the poem celebrates
implicitly and explicitly) has become far more virulent in the United States.
An accurate count of police murders of blacks might reveal that in material
fact lynchings in the United States are at an all-time high. And the
ransacking of the Seattle movement by AFL-CIO conservatives generated
the virulent chauvinism and racism of an ostensibly "progressive" campaign
to keep China out of WTO. (The campaign generated a mealy-mouth
argument that -- profesing great concern for Chinese workers -- in effect
argued that "we" needed to destroy the village to save it.)

So again, I really do not "attack" either Pound or the poem. But I still
*under present conditions* could not quite bring myself to urge someone
to begin its study. There are many wonderful books in the world, and
no one work is essential. I have not (obviously) stopped reading it
myself. And I was delighted when I found out just this week that a
Pound maillist existed.

A note on En Lin Wei: There is a difference between the attacks on a
poet which are merely that -- the kind of attacks which predominated
when I began my reading of Pound -- and attacks which carry with
them a deep acquaintance with the poem and which thereby can
contribute to the understanding of others. The formal judgment (This
is Good; This is Bad) a critic makes is trivial. What is the substance
of his/her response independently of that formal judgment?) In the
'50s it was not uncommon for "critics" who had seemingly not even
read the first Canto to sneer at Pound's [whateve].

Carrol Cox

P.S. It's been almost two decades since I read any criticism or biography
of Pound. Is there any serious account of whether he did in fact suffer
from a mental illness. I ask for this reason. I suffer from clinical depression,
which was not diagnosed however until I was in my mid fifties. The
connection to Pound is this. Almost the first line in the poem which
caught my attention was the parenthetical line,  "(and the mortal fatigue
of action postponed)" (Canto 80) Nothing describes more precisely
what depression feels like in one of its guises.