Here's another passage from the Paris Review interview with Geoffrey Hill,
which list members might find suggestive on the subject of "difficulty" and
elitism in literature:

"We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves,
we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are
mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real
difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why
is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we
are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms,
when, if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner
selves, we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right - not an
obligation - to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on
from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely
difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.
This thought does not originate with me, it's been far better expressed by
others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian
scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called 'inner exile' in the
Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which
miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing.
Heacker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things
the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of
language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective
respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of
language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Mayby an
intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of
consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and
revelations ... resisting, therefore, tyrannical oversimplification".

There seems to me to be a great deal of truth in this, although it doesn't
address the question why so many "difficult" poets in the modernist
tradition were drawn to authoritarian, antidemocratic political regimes.
Perhaps though that is a false question, because on analysis one tends to
find that when Pound is being fascist he is not being difficult. He's being
fascist when he's sloganising (in ABC of Economics etc), pontificating from
the cracker barrel (broadcasts etc), or writing the history of China (China
cantos, all of which are addressed to Mussolini, as indicated by the single
use of the word "you" on page ***). However muddled his thought may be in
many of these writings, they are not "difficult".

Richard Edwards
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