Michael, you ask Bob if there is a "logical culmination of romanticism? I
would answer, yes. It is called for the poet death at a very young and
tender age, the Chatterton syndrome, a feat which Pound failed to
accomplish.
   Less facetiously, Michael, you are on to something by pegging Pound as
the failed romantic, not because he didn't put forth a sterling effort in
overcoming his American inferiority complex with a bloated ego in the
presence of the haut cultur
de Europena but largely because he lived in a destitute time, in fact the
deepest midnight of the destitute night of the Kali Yuga. Bob was getting at
this it in his last posting.  So
re-interpretation of Pound outside this "romantic" attempt to bring
Dionysus up out of the Grund to where he once lead, thyrsus in hand,
 the seasonal water- freeing dance of renewal is simply irrelevant
to anything of importance to Pound or his times. We only hope to see as
Heidegger did that in this age of ours, "In the age of the world's night,
the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured." And Pound did
experience and endure two world wars, incarceration in an open monkey
cage, and the government's official nut-house. Furthermore, Heidegger adds,
"Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the
trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for
their kindred mortals the way toward the turning."
    To those many individuals who have no vision of anything he must then
appear as absolutely a nut-case whether he is conjuring up Athena's wisdom
or Confucius's "heavenly order" for these things mean nothing to those
folks and their age and won't until there is a turn from the darkness. The
political choices of the 1930's and 1940's  were largely a choice between
one feuilletonistic slogan over another. To keep the discussion on this
political level is to continue to skim the surface of Pound and poetry in
the 20th. Cent. and to continue stating the obvious which will continue to
elicit the same remark over again- SO WHAT?
    Pound's destiny as a poet was to attempt to turn on the lights of
divine radience so the gods would once again take up an abode in
everything. He may still prove to have been a significant contributor to
this effort, but we are no where near out of this age, an age that devours
everything in its darkness including its own criticism.

CDM