First of all, I want to thank Garrick Davis for his synopsis of the history
of the Pound debate.  I for one wish we could move past it, but I don't think
it's going to happen.  the debate, as so often happens when arguments linger
past their usefulness, is no longer an honest one -- if it ever was.  Pound
was a fascist, at least in sentiment; he was a vicious anti-Semite; he had
sympathy for Hitler.  These are established facts, generally accepted by
everyone.  Apparently, for critics like Wei, this agreement isn't enough, one
has to constantly denounce Pound, and find little but these failings at the
root of everything Pound said or did.  I know Wei will deny this, but all one
has to do is to read his voluble record over the past weeks to see that this
is precisely the case.  As has been pointed out, if someone says Pound had a
decent impulse, bashers like Wei immediately repeat the litany of Pound's
crimes, real and imagined, usually distorting the argument in the meantime.
this does not make for a fruitful dialectic.  It doesn't matter that they
express desires to discuss the content of Pound's work, the moment that one
attempts to do so, and to do it outside of the uglier aspects of Pound, the
discussion immediately returns this ugliness, ala Shapiro, as Garrick has
noted.  It's as if they, and only they, are able to see the situation for
what it is.  I find this piousness insulting.

I've withdrawn from the debate because it doesn't seem intellectually honest.
 the fact that Wei made public a backchannel post from me without asking for
my consent speaks to his lack of sincerity.  his claim that I didn't
expressly forbid him to so only magnifies the offense.

joe brennan


In a message dated 06/09/2000 5:19:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<<
 Does history repeat itself? On this listserver, any discussion of Pound's
 political and social beliefs invariably leads to this impasse: two opposed
 factions talking past each other. One side seeks to question Pound's
 reputation in light of his questionable political/social beliefs. The other
 faction opposes this approach, by insisting on the importance of the formal
 qualities of his poetry.

 What history is being repeated? Quite simply, we continue to play out the
 debate surrounding The Bollingen Prize of 1949, which Pound won for his Pisan
 Cantos. On one side were the New Critics (Eliot, Tate, Warren , etc.) who
 voted for Pound; on the other side were an assortment of liberal poets and
 critics who were uneasy about the content of The Cantos, among them Karl
 Shapiro and the critics of the Partisan Review (including Clement Greenberg,
 Robert Gorham Davis, and William Barrett.)

 When, for example,  Mr Wei writes:

 "I would say, 'The Cantos," as a unitary work, is a magnficently failed
 attempt
 at a 20th century epic (failed in large part because of its political,
 social, economic, and ethical vision)."

 Mr. Wei is simply restating the objection of Mr. Shapiro who said, in his
 report to the voting board:

 "I voted against Pound in the belief that the poet's political and moral
 philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standard as literary
 work."

 When liberal critics attack Modernist authors (many of whom were
 conservative/ reactionary politically), they often echo the question posed by
 William Barrett in a 1949 issue of the Partisan Review:

 "How far is it possible...for technical embellishments to transform vicious
 and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?"

 The result of the 1949 debate was that Pound received the award, but the New
 Criticism was unfortunately labeled as a politically reactionary movement and
 it began to decline as an influential force, at least in academic circles. I
 should also add that much of the Politically Correct movement dates, or finds
 its ancestry, from 1949. By this I mean that liberal critics (incorrectly I
 believe) derided New Criticism for ignoring "content" in favor of "form."
 These liberal critics then proceeded to talk exclusively about "content" and
 finally ended by subjecting works of literature to crude examinations of
 their political/social ramifications.

 Ultimately, of course, there can be no agreement between Mr. Parcelli and Mr.
 Wei (and the factions they represent) because their critical approaches are
 opposed. In a sense, New Criticism and Political Correctness are modern
 versions of, respectively, Aristotelianism and Platonism. The Politically
 Correct crowd believe that Pound's social/political/racial views have
 consequences and thus must be denounced/regulated/banned. The New Critics see
 the work of art as autonomous, and therefore separable from even the views
 which the work itself seems to assert or glorify.

 Either art is influential (and bad art is dangerous), or art (as Auden said
 of poetry) "makes nothing happen." I stand with the Aristotelians, of course,
 and when I assert that Mr. Wei's (and his faction's) political approach to
 Pound will fail, I do so in the knowledge that all such Platonic attempts are
 not only crude and reductive to the works they claim to criticize, but are
 also (by their very nature) antithetical to the liberal and democratic
 traditions that Mr. Wei speaks so highly of. In this sense, Mr. Wei (along
 with Mr. Surette, and a number of others) betrays his liberal convictions by
 asserting an essential anti-liberal critical position. It was from this
 demonstrable fact, the incoherence of their critical position, that I claimed
 (and continue to claim) that Mr Wei, and the others, were unfit to be
 critics.

 Regards,
 Garrick Davis
 Contemporary Poetry Review
 (www.cprw.com) >>