I am following Burt Hatlen's valuable shift from 'EP & Religion' to how do
we talk about the poetry and the politics AT THE SAME TIME.  I am with him
in spirit on this, but I fear that his way of posing the question is
self-stymying.
To ask 'How was it possible for a fascist and anti-semite to write the first
true "world-epic"?' is to foreclose on the answer and to make it impossible
to get beyond the split.  (I can't agree with Jacob Korg that Anthony
Julius's book on T.S.Eliot shows how to do it.  It reads the poetry,
certainly, but with a prosecutor's mindset.)   We have a similar difficulty
with the mind/body split:
so long as we speak of 'mind' and 'body' we will continue to be split.  So
long as we speak of 'The Cantos of EP'--which is what makes EP worth
speaking about--in terms of  'the politics' and 'the poetry' we will go
round and round in the tedious and unprofitable circles.  We have to change
our perceptions and learn how to read 'The Cantos' as at once both and
neither.  They belong in another category of intellection.  And one we have
to come to by direct experience of the writing not by 'abstract yatter'.
No, I am not separating
the poem out from its responsibilities, precisely not that.  Nor am I
talking about what he wrote outside 'The Cantos'.  To paraphrase Burt
Hatlen, the critical debate about them will be banal and unproductive so
long as we talk about the retrograde social and political views and about
the poetry as something apart from everything or anything that it is in its
making.

David Moody