[log in to unmask],.Internet writes:
>>Robert Duncan said that Pound was  "pagan fundamentalist."
>Where did Duncan say this. I would be very grateful if Burt Hatlen could
>supply the reference.
>Stephen Wilson.


Here's the full quotation:

"Pound derives from the Neoplatonic cult of Helios, from the Provencal
cult of Amor, from the Renaissance revival of pagan mysteries after
Gemistos Plethon, and from the immediate influence of the theosophical
revival in which Yeats was immersed, an analogous tradition of poetry
as a vehicle for heterodox belief, a ground in which the divine world
may appear (with the exception of the Judeo-Christian orders). At the
thought of Jesus, Pound has all the furious fanaticism of the Emperor
Julian; he is a pagan fundamentalist. Aphrodite may appear to the poet,
and even Kuanon, but not Mary; Helios and even Ra-Set may come into the
poem, but not Christ. Yet these gods of the old world are not only
illustrations of a living tradition; they are, Pound testifies
throughout The Cantos, presences of a living experience. Does the poet
cast them as images upon our minds or do they use the medium of the
poem to present themselves?  They come to the poet as he calls them up.
So, in the first draft of Canto I: 'Gods float in the azure air . . .'
                'It is not gone,' Metastasio
                Is right, we have that world about us."
                                                                        (II.5: 340)

The citation refers to Part II, Chapter 5 of The H.D. Book. Published
in fragments during Duncan's lifetime,  The H.D. Book, one of our
century's central works of poetic theory, is still not available as a
book, although the University of California Press is supposedly
committed to publishing it. The quotation comes from a section of Part
II, Chapter 5, that was published in the journal Stony Brook 3/4 (Fall
1969), pp. 336-347.

The quoted passage, by the way, also raises what seems to me the
central issue about Pound's "religion." Did he subscribe to a set of
"religious beliefs," pagan or otherwise, that stand apart from and
prior to the poem?  Or is THE POEM ITSELF the locus of religious
experience, for him? Duncan suggests the later.  The poet as theurge,
and the poem itself as the place where the gods show themselves. Now
that's an idea that really does challenge our assumptions about
religion and poetry and the relationship between the two.

Syrette and Tryphonopoulos have, of course, been moving toward a
"Duncanesque" view of Pound, with their theory that he belongs within
the history of the "occult."  But Surette at least shows no interest in
Pound's poetry, casting the issue entirely as a question of Pound's
presumed beliefs, within the context of 19th and 20th century
intellectual history. (Indeed, Surette says as much in The Birth of
Modernism: "The rationale of this study is much closer to the old
method of the history of ideas" (5).)And as long as we try to read
Pound as primarily a "thinker," we will, I think, miss the point. The
poet is a maker, and we need to be talking about what he MADE, not
about what he may or may not have "thought."

Burt Hatlen