After years of thinking about Pound's radio voice and its relation to his
poetic voice, I finally got around to wondering about Pound's physical
sense of hearing.  Before I go to Mary de Rachewiltz or Bacigalupo on
this, I'm wondering if anyone on the list knows anything about whether
Pound's hearing deteriorated (as his eyesight did) with age.

I'm inspired by Williams's recollection of Pound's unnecessarily soft
speaking voice when reading his poems as a teenager.  Williams also calls
Pound tone deaf in the Paris Review interview (or was it correspondence
with Laughlin?).  And there is certainly a great deal in the
correspondence about Pound being unable to hear his own broadcasts--though
he always blames it on the technology.

Then again, Pound seems to have had an exquisite ear for music.  The
deficiencies of his own music might be accounted for by his lack of
training rather than physical problems with hearing.

This is all in service of a new and fanciful notion that Pound's
figurative (and literal?) "deaf spot" helps account for his inability to
distinguish between rhetorical registers starting in the mid-1930s.

Jonathan Gill
Columbia University