My Dear Mr. Freind,
I think you would do well to listen to the actual content of Mr.
Brennan's replies and stop distorting them.

As for En Lin Wei. We've recently been treated to Pound as the poetic
equivalent of Hitler's and Mussolini's propaganda minister even though
no such position seemed to exist. Obviously good career moves on the
part of Casillo and Perelman and, at least in Casillo's case not without
research value but destroyed by personal and scholarly excesses. Sound
familiar. We must stick to what Pound actually accomplished as political
adviser e.g. his great success convincing Roosevelt to stay out of the
war.

In the past we have had Pound as the artistic adviser of the reactionary
right in American politics most recently in an anemic little piece by
Marjorie Perloff.

Now, Wei has found a niche for himself/herself. He/she is fluent in
Chinese history; Far more so than Pound and certainly more than myself
and others on this list who find fault with his appraoch. But Mr./Ms.
Wei has no discernible sense of the Pound's poetry and has as much
admitted it to me when I posited aspects of Pound's methodology in the
Cantos as countering his/her contentions. This does not seem to bother
Wei even though last time I looked the Cantos were a poem. Apparently,
they are rapidly losing this status and when judged as something else
than what they are become much diminished. Mr./Ms. Wei would be more
convincing if he/she provided the scholarly data on Chinese history and
philosophy (e. g. Pound's conversion from Confucianism to Taoism as
stylized by Wei) and did not attempt his overbearing hermeneutical
synthesis on th entire poem. Such beautiful poetry wasted on such small
ambitions. CP

Bill Freind wrote:
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