This is a perfect example of what has been wrong with so many of the posts that
have attempted to defend Pound's politics: it pretty much ignores my original post
to bash an argument I never made. Specifically:

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> the issue is not whether Pound was democratic, but that he didn't despise
> governments because they were democratic.

I have no idea what this means. What I said was that Pound was deeply skeptical of
representative democracy. What I also said was that Pound really didn't care much
about the specifics of governments; instead, he was much more attracted to the
strong leader.

> as far as saying that he believed
> in the constitution, I think we can take him at his word, remembering, of
> course, that the our concepts of the constitution are not the same.

Why should we take him at his word, since it seems anomalous (to put it mildly) to
suggest that someone who repeatedly endorses dictators and ruling elites could *at
the same time* support the Constitution of a republican democracy?

> my
> objection is to the sweeping denunciations of Pound and his politics, as if
> nothing he believed in wasn't somehow vitiated or contaminated by his more
> obnoxious beliefs.

I disagree with that, too. However, I'd suggest the bigger problem is those who
would ignore his politics -- and a few people here have come very close to that.

>  there's merit in much of what he had to say about
> politics, as well as his economic positions.

Right, but isn't that true of almost every political movement in history? One
would have to be pretty dense not to spot the problems between the wars.

> the ugliness of Pound is not
> news, and to imply, as wei has done, that his sins outweigh his value, is,
> from my point of view, simply wrong.

I disagree with that argument, too. However, I completely reject the claims that
the Cantos are not explicitly political, or that Pound was a relatively orthodox
Jeffersonian.

>
> Pound borrowed from many sources, so to say that the key to understanding him
> is to understand his Confucianism is to reduce him to that, which is, again,
> unhelpful.

Again, that's not what I said. Instead, I said the key to understanding his
politics is to understand his Confucianism.

>  the genius of Pound's poetry is that it isn't reductive, but, on
> the contrary,  it increases and expands the experience.  as has been pointed

> out, Mussolini's involvement in the Cantos is no greater than, Jefferson's or
> Malatesta's.

Which is precisely why my post was about Confucius, not Mussolini. The standard
way to reject the argument that the political vision of the Cantos is totalitarian
is to count the references to Mussolini and Hitler. As we all know, there really
aren't that many of them. However, as I said, Pound's Confucianism leads him to
celebrate strong and even totalitarian leaders. As a result, I think it's
perfectly reasonable to say that the political vision of the Cantos aspires to
totalitarianism. To be blunt, it's hard for me to see how anyone could argue
otherwise.

> To say that Mussolini is central to the Cantos, and thus to
> Pound,

Where is this coming from? I never said anything like this.

> makes one wonder how Mussolini & Confucius can simultaneously occupy
> the same place, unless he's implying that there's no difference between the
> two.

Pound's Mussolini is a Confucian leader.Does that even need to be argued? Pound
himself says it in a number of places. *Every* celebrated leader in the Cantos is
a Confucian leader.

> I don't get the impression that anyone is trying to sanitize Pound's
> politics, and I find the suggestion offensive.

As I said above, I've seen people claim that Pound was essentially an orthodox
Jeffersonian who supported representative democracy. Given the extraordinary
number of places that directly contradict that view, I consider that an attempt to
sanitize his politics. I think the reason that some people are rewriting Pound's
political commitments isn't because those correspondents themselves have
questionable politics; instead, it's because they see a threat to Pound's poetic
achievement. In the wake of hatchet jobs like Casillo's book, that's not
unfounded. At the same time, Casillo does an excellent job at demolishing the
extenuations which too many critics invented for Pound's totalitarianism and
anti-Semitism, and we should be very careful to avoid a return to those
indefensible positions.


Bill Freind