In the whole field of Poundian criticism, there is only scholar worth reading and that is Hugh Kenner.
 
You could usefully burn all the scholarly books written about Pound, save one: The Pound Era. Perhaps one would also salvage Donald Davie's Pound: Poet as Sculptor, for his chapter on Pound's Noh dramas at least.
 
This is to distinguish, of course, between the academic criticism and the professional criticism: one should read Eliot's little book on Pound and his metrics, as well as the criticism compiled in An Examination of Ezra Pound. One wants to know what Yeats, Hemingway, et al thought.
 
There is one great problem in this field, and that is the number of critics who wish to speak of the political Pound and not the poetical one. Pound the fascist, possibly insane, and unrepentant anti-semite is a biographer's dream but what does it tell us about the man most responsible for the taste of 20th century English-language poetry? Very little. And that is, after all, why we speak of him still.
 
The number of mean-spirited and ridiculous books on the political Pound is legion:
Wlliam Chace's The Political Identities of Ezra Pound
and T.S. Eliot
Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons
Paul Morrison's The Poetics of Fascism
Massimo Bacigalupo's The Formed Trace
Wendy Stallard Flory's The American Ezra Pound
E. Fuller Torrey's The Roots of Treason
C. David Heymann's E.P.: The Last Rowerr
 
Tim Redman's book, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, is almost alone in the field, a balanced discussion of  Pound's interest in Mussolini.
 
As for biographies, take your pick. Mullins' book is by no means the worst of the group, and is apt to be underpraised because of its frankly celebratory approach to Pound's career and its slighting of his political-social views.
 
Someone said that the field is open and needs fresh blood? Only if that means a return to the discussion of Pound the poet, a task which (let us admit) most of our modern scholars are hardly capable of performing.
 
Let us return to RP Blackmur's essays, and Randall Jarrell's asides, and if we return to the subject of Pound as fascist let it be only to discuss the relationship of art and morality (ie the Bollingen affair) for which the later Pound serves (at least in some of the Cantos) as a signal example.
 
Regards,
 
Garrick Davis
Contemporary Poetry Review