Dear Poundians

Now that we all agree that all money is fictitious...

How about the idea that the same notion troubled Pound, especially when it
suggested that all forms of representation, including language, are
social?

There's lots of work on Pound and money (Richard Sieburth, Earle Davis,
Peter Nicholls, to start) but none it, to my mind, solves the problem of
how Pound's ideas about money developed and changed (along with, of
course, his ideas about poetry).

My guess is that Imagism is his "hard" period (coinciding with the
founding of the Federal Reserve), after which he moves ever more towards
the "soft" ideology of the radio years.  By "hard" and "soft" I mean money
and language as intrinsically valuable versus money and language as purely
referential.  Historians like Walter Benn Michaels and Marc Shell are also
good in this area, albeit not specifically as regards Pound.

Or perhaps it's just not possible to assert that Pound ever really had a
single, coherent, describable understanding of economics (or the way
language works).

Jonathan Gill
Columbia University