Thanks, Dan, for your flattering remarks on my posting. However, I do not
accept your New Critical criteria which restrict interpretation to an
immediate context of a dozen or so lines. Even on New Critical principles, a
single poem--even a very long one--surely qualifies in its entirely as a
pertinent context.
    But my disagreement with New Criticism goes far beyond that. I think
that anything Pound wrote or is reporting as having said is pertinent to the
interpretive enterprise. In short, I operate on the principles of German
hermeneutics as opposed to New Critical ones. Of course, various caveats
have to be observed--notably that poets, like other human beings, change
their minds, and their attitudes. Also, like other human beings, they are
not omniscient or incapable of error. They may mispeak themselves, and we
cannot assume that when they employ a word that they have the entire entry
in the OED in mind.
    Anyone alert to critical principles will notice, that I assume in the
foregoing that the relevant meaning is what some folks call "author's
meaning." However, my imnpression is almost everyone posting to this list
accepts that unfashionable critical principle. On deconstructive principles,
the meaning is whatever Pound's time, class, race, gender, etc. etc. would
have said according to the commentator's understanding or what such an
postulated individual would have said. Disagreements on those grounds are
about who is best qualified to say which class of individual should be
postulated, and that usually comes down to an appeal to authority--either
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze or some other Frenchman.

All the best,
Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7