Striking a familiar posture, Lee Lady once again assures us that he ain't
no academic. He ain't original, either. In _Sexual Personae_, Camille
Paglia is all loud brag about the daring originality of her insights into
Emily Dickinson -- insights that nevertheless managed to visit the
professional scholars half a century before they lit on Camille. Anthony
Burgess runs through the same child-of-nature routine about himself in _Re:
Joyce_.
 
And then there's Ezra Pound, whose relationship with the academy was much
more vexed and much more interesting. About that I wonder: would it be
productive to shelve the cornpone Old Ez persona of the letters alongside
Davy Crockett, Will Rogers, the 19th-century Bowery orator Mike Walsh, and
other political writers whose personae gave literary form to wordless
anti-intellectualism? Walt Whitman's language emerged from that political
tradition -- emerged and then left it behind. But what about Pound?
 
Jonathan Morse