It occurs to me that the ever recurring question -- How could Pound write
anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist propaganda, and also write such great
poetry? -- reveals more about the questioners' mindset than it ever will
about Pound.   What it reveals is the difficulty of getting our minds around
the relativity and complexity of things.  The cause of that difficulty is
dealing in absolutes and either/ors.  The source is our Hebraic-Christian
culture.  Very difficult to get out of that.  So we simplify, holding on to
just one graspable aspect of the case at a time, and making that the whole
case for the time.  He wrote anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist propaganda and
that's all that's to be said.  It is all that some want to say or have said.
Or, he wrote <The Cantos> and that is all that matters -- as if the poetry
would be invalidated if the propaganda were seen for what it is.  Whereas it
is the case that he wrote both the poetry and the propaganda, and that
neither cancels out the other.  Both/and, or yes/yes -- a truer structure
for thinking than the binary yes/no, but it doesn't come naturally in our
particular culture.  Of course it does put a strain on the moralized mind,
this trying to marry heaven and hell.

As for Purgatory, as I am sure Leon Surette is well aware, that's the state
of those who went wrong without losing rightness.   I can go along with
that, as a neat metaphor.

But what I can't understand is how people can sit in judgment on Pound as
confidently as if they were the Christian deity, all-knowing.  The rest of
us have to allow for having a more limiting point of view.  As Jennifer
Wilson crisply remarked.

Many thanks to Ian Kluge for his informing good sense.

David Moody