I agree with Garrick in the main.  Pound was an anti-Semite and a fascist
sympathizer, by his own admission.  But the desire to somehow codify his
anti-Semitism and/or his fascism, to place it once and for all in a final,
decisive context as it relates to his work, is unattainable.  Anti-Semitism,
like all forms of racism, is deeply personal in both feeling and expression,
and as such is not reducible.  Pound was also one of the great poets of this
century, whose method was truly revolutionary, and who's concern for the role
of art in creating a humane world was sincere -- however inconsistent this
concern appears to be with his anti-Semitic and pro-fascist expression.
Those who have studied Pound's works, and who have read the supportive
materials can't help but be struck by the complexity of the man and the depth
of his convictions, whether admirable or not.  It's also inevitable that
those who are new to the study of Pound will have to wrestle with the glaring
inconsistencies he manifests.
 
joe brennan
 
 
In a message dated 11/16/1999 2:28:16 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
 
<<     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)
  >>