Wei writes:
>...What does it say about
> American culture, and American ideology, that the most successful--or the
> greatest -- attempt at a universal epic by an American is a fascist
> imperialist epic?  This question is almost unaskable, and I have not seen
it
> addressed.

wei,
     but, there's a little problem with this -
how  square your thesis with his prosecution
as an enemy of yankee empire?...the which he never
recanted, eh?  if the cantos are an american epic,
it is, rather,  like twain, eliot, hemingway,... etc.,
one of abject revulsion for the dominant culture.

the pt of the pound-ian martial trope is its being the
anti-thesis to the reigning bourgeois.
and, as the latter is matriarchical,
the rape and abduction of females at the end of canto 40,
for being a patriarchical form, illustrates the arch-cultural agon
in a metafor of mating.

pound opposed bourgeois imperialism,
filistinism of its culture, with every fiber of his being.
perhaps not illogically given his bourgeois education
(the complete absence of proletarian classics) the heroic image
of the pre-bourgeois war-lord (the iliad, bertran de born,
cavalcanti) afforded the only alternative to the regnant
babbit matriachy...so in the vortex of crises of his times
that he should percieve this heroic revolutionary posture in
reactionism, mussolini & co, is unexceptionalbe
...ie, incapaz, no prole sensibility, as he unfortunately was for marx & co.

bob