Dear Listmembers,

A thousand e-mails (and only ten days) ago, I posted my article
"Misunderstanding Ezra Pound" with the lamentable results that Mr. Surette
had to apologize to everyone British, and En Lin Wei had to denounce
everything Confucian. I wanted to respond publicly to several of the posted
remarks.

Leon Surette wrote:
I have read Mr. Davis's "review" of four books which discuss Pound
poetry and politics. The most recent of these books was published in 1989,
and the earliest in 1980. It is difficult to understand how his piece
qualifies as a review.
    It is, in fact, a diatribe against the entire class of Pound scholars
masquerading as a review. The four books he selects are not as bad as he
makes out, nor are they representative of the scholarly discussion of
Pound's political and racial views.

Mr. Surette is certainly correct when he says that my review is an attack.
The attack is directed at all Pound scholars who use Pound's fascism,
antisemitism, and alleged insanity to mitigate his poetic achievements. These
tactics, far from being unrepresentative of the "scholarly discussion," are
common and pernicious. Mr. Surette in his latest posting, entitled
"Psychiatric Disorders," is attempting to diagnose Pound in much the same way
E. Fuller Torrey does in his infamous book. What possible importance could
such investigations have, as a critical approach? I suspect that Mr. Surette,
like Mr. Torrey, is still searching for "the roots of treason."

Leon Surette wrote:
  It is difficult to understand what contribution Mr. Davis believes
himself to be making to the study of Pound's poetry and career.

I think my intentions were perfectly clear. I also find it hard to believe
that a man of Mr. Surrette's sophistication could find my positions
"difficult to understand." What Mr. Surette seems to be saying, in a very
scholarly and polite way, is that my article makes no contribution to
Poundian scholarship. Perhaps he is right; I only wish Mr. Surette would have
the courage to say that and then explain why he thinks so. For, without
presenting an argument against my article, Mr. Surette seems to be defending
those critical tactics which he himself subscribes to, while calling those
very books "unrepresentative."

As for my "contribution," I think that some consensus has been reached that
Casillo's book is a miserable production (to paraphrase a number of
dismissals I have read recently),  and that Torrey's book is despicable (or,
as Mr. Gill said, a book "which most academics (guilty, your honor) dismiss
as motivated by something other than disinterested truth.") No one bothered
to dismiss or defend Ms. Flory's critically incoherent volume, and I stand by
my opinion on that book as well. I was, quite possibly, unfair to Massimo
Bacigalupo's book in the main (as he pointed out to me recently), but then I
was attacking his Foreword (which seems to broadly misrepresent the content
and tone of the book as a whole). The Formed Trace aside for the moment, the
dismissal of three books in particular (and several critical approaches in
general) was my aim.
It goes without saying that the dismissal of unjust books (by Poundian
critics and scholars I might add) from the canon of responsible criticism is
a worthy goal, in my opinion.

Finally, I put myself on the side of the angels, which means alongside Mr.
David Moody. I agree with the sum and substance of his email (5/31/00), which
criticized the positions of En Lin Wei. Mr. Wei, it seems to me, is doing
Robert Casillo's work all over again, this time through an anti-Confucian
lens. Such an essentially political approach is bound to be fruitless, I
maintain. Why? Mr. Moody shall have the last word, "In general, poets do seem
to have a better sense of how to read them [The Cantos] than critics.  But
then critics seem all too often not to have their eye on the poetry."

Garrick Davis
Contemporary Poetry Review
(www.cprw.com)