Robert,
Though a similar anti-bourgeois theme appears in Pound's famous translation of "The Seafarer," in his rendering of the Anglo-Saxon poem there is none of the double-edged criticism we find here in the poem "Further Instructions," where the phrase "our baser passions" refers, I think, to his envy of the safe and the sinecured, to his own "sour-grapes" attitude with its admixture of inferiority-complex. By the end of the poem, the flip-side of that complex
emerges -- a "we'll show them" bravado in his promising to clothe his youngest child -- his newest song-- in the fine silks of the exotic imagination:
 
    I will get you a green coat out of China
    With dragons worked upon it,
    I will get you the scarlet silk trousers
    From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria Novella
    Lest they say we are lacking in taste,
    Or that there is no caste in this family.
 
And we find him sitting on the Dogana's steps.
 
Tim Romano
 
 
 
 
Robert Kibler wrote:
 
> As everyone knows, Pound was kicked out of the academy, and once he achieved fame, tried to get back to the U.S. from Europe in that capacity. Unfortunately, he had become too boistrous and  pro-fascist, and no department wanted him. His poetry, too, is arguably that best suited for the researcher, for the academic. The Cantos are the professor's friend more so than they are the friend of those who would simply open up a page randomly on the bookshelf.
>    As this quote is a response to the assertion that Pound wanted to be an academic, how are we to take it?  Are envy of the man with the steady job, and no worry about the future the baser passions the poet would express?  If so, the quote confirms the assertion on the one hand, and on the other, critiques the persona that would revel in the carefree life.  Kind of a proto Philip Larkin (Toads, Toads Revisited)?
>
>
> >>> Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> 08/20 10:18 AM >>>
> "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions,
> Let us express our envy of the man with a steady job and no worry about the
> future."
>
> Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>
> >
> > [...] EP would have liked nothing better than to have become
> > a REAL professor rather than just working out of his own
> > Ezuversity.