Bob,
The nation at large is more interested in whether Pete Rose is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame than in whether Pound belongs in the Poet's Corner. Not one American in ten thousand cares about the philosophical issues we've been discussing on this list. Not one in a thousand has a clue. 
 
The subject we've been discussing, in that it impinges upon the horrors of the holocaust, is an emotional one, and the attempts to demonize Pound (Morse, in my opinion), or conversely, the effort not to do so by separating the EVIL THINGS he did from his poetry thereby confining oneself to the heart's Clean Room (Dan Pearlman's compartmentalism) are natural, fully understandable emotional responses to that legacy. But if we're going to make USE of Pound, we have to turn the light on the intellectual discourse and social conditions that shaped his thought.
 
Pound wrote apropos of e.e. cummings's trip to Soviet Russia and e.e.'s book about that visit entitled EIMI ("or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to pronounce it"):
 
"Now the USE of a great writer to his RACE is due precisely to his having PERSONAL direct perception, and puttin' it down on paper. Don't matter what he thinks he is doin', his USE to race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record. Mebbe by an' by afterwards that word photo, that diagram, that TRUE diagram can serve to enlighten his people. Don't forget they are HIS people as they will never be the people of any member of Congress."
 
Tim Romano
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: bob scheetz <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 8:36 PM
 
> gawd this is rich...!
> 
> well, tim, convinced yet?
> 
> you were expecting maybe some elementary level
> of intellectual integrity?...good faith?
>