The never-ending discussion of Pound's fascism and anti-Semitism, which
this listserver indulges in and which is the sole focus of Poundian criticism
lately, raises several questions.
1. What important insights or critical judgments has such an approach
discovered?
I would maintain very few. Such an approach all too often leads to
primitive moralizing. Either Pound was an idiotic crank or a truly evil man,
so the theory divides. How could Pound the idiotic crank also be Pound the
brilliant inventor of 20th century poetry? How could Pound the Nazi
Jew-baiter write the "Ballad of the Goodly Fere"? No answers are forthcoming
from these moral critics. Need it be added that when a critical approach
leads neither to a richer nor more just understanding of the poetry, it is
bankrupt?
A distinction should be made here: many of the participants to this
listserver seem fascinated by Pound the man, but indifferent to Pound's
poetry. This I infer from their letters, which are invariably biographical
and obsessed with marginalia. One can either dismiss this industry as
superfluous or complement it as scholarship, though of a pedestrian variety.
But it is a mere hobby if pursued without serious purpose. Poetry is, after
all, the only reason Pound remains of permanent interest.
Such academic seashell-collecting has always struck the average reader as
pointless. It is worse than this, I fear; it is actively harmful, in so far
as the accumulation of useless facts and disconnected insights helps to
obscure their superiors: those useful facts and insights which contribute to
the formation of literary judgment. A thousand mediocre books are quite
capable of hiding, on the dusty shelves, a dozen good books from their proper
readers: a phenomenon that any visitor to a research library can attest to.
Gresham's Law (that phony currency drives out the good) surely exists today
and applies to our publishing lists and libraries.
2. What conclusions can be drawn from this obsession with Pound's fascist and
anti-Semitic sympathies?
The underlying assumption concerning this basically moral (and, I should add,
rather traditional) approach to criticism is that to understand the work one
must understand the man. Biographical facts will lead to textual insights.
This critical approach was banished, all too briefly, by the New Criticism in
the early decades of this century. And all the objections to this approach,
as formulated by that movement, remain valid to this day. It has been used
admirably by a few critics, and disastrously by many others. Is it sheer
coincidence that the Golden Age of modern criticism (an era which contained
Eliot, Pound, Blackmur, Tate, Ransom, Auden, to name a very few) was an age
which distrusted the moral/biographical/historical approaches to criticism
and preferred close textual analysis of the work instead?
This leads to a last, bitter truth: many of our academic scholars have
produced defective criticism (harnessed, paradoxically, to excellent
scholarship) because they are ignorant of the most basic critical approaches.
That is, our universities produce literary scholars unfamiliar with the great
American critics. How many of our Poundian critics have read our great
critics of poetry like Poe, Mencken, James, Santayana, Tate, Eliot, Pound,
Jarrell, Auden, Blackmur, Jarrell, Wilson, and Winters...not to mention our
good critics like Trilling, Warren, Wimsatt, Matthiessen, Burke, Crane, and
Brooks? How many of our scholars have even heard of Saintsbury or Gourmont?
Having read none of the great criticism of the past century (or of any
century for that matter) what wonder that they reproduce the stupidities of
mediocre critics?
Perhaps our scholars (including some on this listserver) should ask
themselves what any further elucidation of Pound's political/moral/social
sympathies will contribute to the understanding of his poetry. I would think
this to be, for the critic or scholar of poetry, a matter of first principles.
Regards,
Garrick Davis
Contemporary Poetry Review
(www.cprw.com)
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