To muddy the waters a little further on the discussion of these
3 stanzas beginning "Ed ascoltando" (C. 81) ...

I read somewhere that Pound's ms. had to pass the camp censors.
I believe they thought he might be passing some secret info in
code.  One has to recognize that for Pound to openly satirize
the army in the Pisans would have been difficult for him to
get away with. As a result, it makes perfect sense to me that
he would, if his intention were to incorporate such a satire,
use the traditional means that writers in confinement or under
oppressive regimes use: symbolism, allegory, obliqueness,
difficult language, words with double meaning, etc.

I think that, given his circumstances, we should not be surprised
to dig up a layer of meaning (maybe not just in this passage)
that criticizes his captors.  I am, as critic, sensitized to this
use of language in modern poetry through my long study of Robert
Frost, whose poetry of the 30s, especially in the great volume
called A FURTHER RANGE, is rife with poems of semi-concealed
political satire against the Roosevelt admin despite a surface
of *nature* imagery--an interesting possible parallel here.
(Frost felt threatened by the New Deal.  He thought it was
step one of a communist takeover, and it was "politically
incorrect" for him to satirize the admin too openly. For years
I've been promising my grad students that I'll complete
my book exposing this virtually unrecognized layer of satire in
Frost--on which I've published a couple of articles so far
only--but for 18 years I've been writing little other than
fiction.)

==Dan
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