I snipped all of the following from the website Charles provided us.  I
have omitted all references to the individual speakers the website
quotes because I'm interested in the general assumptions the speakers
seem to share:

"Some of the electors defended their votes for Pound, voicing repulsion
with his political activity but citing him as a seminal poet. . . 'I
know the horrendous things that Pound did' . . . 'the malice of his
madness is not relevant to his stature as a poet' . . . an apology for
what Pound called his 'stupid suburban prejudice.'

not representative of Christian values

'The belief in art for art's sake is neither Christian nor Jewish,' she
said. 'We are not a temple to the Muses.' . . . celebrate the heroic
achievements of his work as distinguished from the prejudicial opinions
and comments of his crazy economic theory . . . if the literature is
the criteria he belongs there, and in fact his absence is utterly
ludicrous . . . 'It is a question of developing an esthetic theology.'

Pound's moral guilt . . . a climate of opinion that enabled the
Holocaust to happen . . . 'It is interesting that the anti-Semitism
does not enter Pound's poetry,' he said. 'He knew that it was morally
wrong. . . . . In broadcasts from Italy from January 1941 to July 1943,
Pound blamed Jews and other groups for the world's economic problems.
He was indicted for treason in 1943 and was arrested by American forces
and imprisoned in 1945 in a special cage at an Army installation near
Pisa. Later that year he was judged mentally unfit to stand trial and
was confined to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental institution in
Washington. "

----------------

        What I see going on here is a yoking of anti-Semitism,
anti-Christianity, critical economics, "malice" and treason under the
general rubric of "the crazy".  "Madness" is what the diagnosticians of
culture still see, as these comments demonstrate nicely.  No matter the
confusions of non-Poundians, it cannot stand up to scrutiny that EP was
interested in art for art's sake.  Instead, through the figure of
useful effort, his aesthetic projects seem to merge with his less
traditionally artistic interests to make a continuum between
unflinching criticism and the effects of the beautiful.  The will to
bring about both was a life's aggregate consequence.  In other words,
as many have already said here, EP cannot quite belong in a temple
consecrated to sweetness and light.  His (perhaps thin &
over-confident) resistance to Western economic ideology is enough to
disqualify him from the Arnoldian role of poet-as-secular-saint/savior.
  (Imagine how mad Pound would have appeared to George F. Babbitt, for
those of you who have read that delightful novel.)
        The fact that it is so very easy to call a set of economic ideas
"crazy" points to the real workings of ideology, discriminating away
from the group the aberrant individual in order to make clear the
boundaries of normalcy.  Frost did not confront the kind of
surveillance by experts because he was not "mad"; on the other hand we
know Pound to be "mad" because of the institutions his body was sealed
in, under the gaze of those who would gather information about his
habits.  Unreason had been defined in ways like this for at least two
centuries, and had been habitually sealed away from the scrutiny of the
public, much as prisoners who were once placed in stocks came to be
placed behind a number of walls topped with barbed wire.  This moment,
then, the moment of the caged Pound, stands as a figure for the
definition of unreason (and reason) in the mid-twentieth-century, and
importantly, signals a way that art does not defend one from the social
application of madness.
        What they say we need is an esthetic theology to deal with Pound's
troubled place, either in the canon or in the cathedral.  As the
canon/cathedral could in a sense be seen as the inverse of the cage and
the hospital bed, maybe what we need is instead an account of the
criteria used by social experts to subordinate both aesthetics &
theology to the material status quo of normality.  After the Holocaust,
as everyone knows, the criteria for socially approved normality
shifted: how is Pound's anti-Semitism sufficiently different from that
of his compeers (e.g. Eliot, Cummings, others) that his is malicious
madness, and the others' simply the consequence of bad influences in
their discourse environments?  (After all, Eliot spent no time in a
box, that I know of, and neither did Cummings. . . in fact, if anyone
knows of other modernists who ended up similarly locked away? )
        This is an issue about which I'd like to read much more.  Is there,
off the top of your wonderful heads, a book like "The Madness of Ezra
Pound"?  Or a study of this period's approach to madness that might
illuminate Pound-in-a-box?

Kind regards,
Jon,

who still thinks Foucault is too important to be abandoned to prejudice
and intellectual intimidation.

and who thinks that two lines from HSW should suffice for Pound's
virtual Poet's Corner inscription, which we can gladly imagine, until
the sad event of Pound's naturalization as a grate Amer-eye-can poed:
"usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places".

On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 06:16  AM, charles moyer wrote:

> As expected it's worse than that.
>  Go to http://www.loper.org/~george/trends/1999/Oct/76.html
> When I looked at this site and read the quotations on the stones for
> each
> writer I had to laugh at how each quotation, naturally brief,
> naturally out
> of any context, was chosen so it could be safely interpreted "nihil
> obstat"
> "inspirational" -old trick of the old trickster preacher. But how many
> possible quotations I could see also from nearly all these writers that
> would appear to have been inspired by Old Beezelbub himself. And so the
> perfect wedding made in Heaven between the Institution and his bride
> Hypocrisy continues its public nuptials, now in a "poets' ingle".
>     And Redman, you are quoted here as saying "and he (Pound)
> contributed
> to a climate of opinion that enabled the Holocaust to happen". I would
> like
> to see even this "water-down" accusation  proved. Was there ever
> anyone who
> condoned the Nazi pogrom because they were guided by Pound's remarks?
> Since
> Pound was never tried the question should forever remain mute. But it
> doesn't because it fits so well others' political agendas. I suggest
> you ask
> Carlo Parcelli how influential Pound is to today's raving Hamans.
>    And as for Ms. Ra, the converted Jew who has joined the
> congregation of
> the better networking Episcopalians and is responsible for leading the
> righteous charge of petitioners might when confronted with the
> scripture of
> John 1:47 of her newly discovered "word of God" comfortably identify
> herself
> with Nathaniel rather than the others to which her apparently
> "self-hating"
> Messiah refers.
>
>     Here's a different quote for Henry James' stone:
> "the triumph of superficiality and the apotheosis of the raw"
>
>     Here's another suggestion for Frost's rock of ages:
> "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
> And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
>
> This could be fun. Anyone else want to play?
>
> Charles
>
>
> ----------
>> From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Pound's nomination to Writers Corner
>> Date: Wed, Mar 5, 2003, 5:45 AM
>>
>
>> "Writers Corner" sounds like some kind of clerical purgatory anyway,
>> where
>> the writers are expected to face the wall and remain silent.
>>
>> "The death of any great nation is always a suicide." -Arnold Toynbee
>>
>> ----------
>>> From: Tom White <[log in to unmask]>
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Pound's nomination to Writers Corner
>>> Date: Tue, Mar 4, 2003, 11:13 PM
>>>
>>
>>> I can't imagine Pound would want, alive or dead, to keep company
>>> with the
>>> kind of people controlling access to this "Writers Corner." He has
>>> made
>>> quite sure that it will be centuries before commonplace,
>>> conventional, and
>>> stupid people will be able to be comfortable in his presence or do
>>> anything
>>> but shriek and run from the room when his name is mentioned.
>>> Meanwhile we
>>> live amid the final rendering and grinding down of the injustices he
>>> railed
>>> against. It was Emerson I think who said a man is bigger than a
>>> city, surely
>>> he is bigger than a cathedral. Tom White
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> From: Jennifer Wilson <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>>>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 21:54:54 EST
>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>> Subject: Pound's nomination to Writers Corner
>