On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Sarah Graham wrote:
 
> As to the popularity of Pound, well, I've been working on
> H.D. and Pound for the last couple of years and the response I receive when
> someone (male or female) finds out about my project is always 'H.D. -
> interesting; Pound - no thanks'. The reasons are usually cited as
> ideological or that the poetry is simply too complex (with a subtext that
> unravelling the complexity doesn't repay the time and effort required) - and
> these are comments from post-graduates or scholars already at work in
> universities. Perhaps this is a British phenomenon, but it doesn't seem to
> apply to H.D. or Williams or Stevens (or even, to an extent, Eliot). One
> tutor here teaches a course that includes H.D. and Pound along with other
> 'moderns' but she tells me that the (undergraduate) students "don't like"
> Pound nearly as much as the others, a feeling she agrees with and (possibly)
> communicates to the students.
 
> I suspect that his popularity as a subject for study (by men or
> women) may be in decline, or at the very least not noticeably increasing;
> again I don't know why and I may only be seeing the British picture - EP's
> work is hard to get here and his presence on poetry courses (such as there
> are) pretty minimal. But it doesn't take much to push a writer back into
> fashion, and that could easily happen with Pound.
 
Quite apart from Sarah Graham's legitimate concerns about gender-balance
in Pound scholarship, the issue of leading students into curiosity and
then study of Pound is very real.  He's a tough sell, for many reasons,
and I think this list would serve a good function if it discussed
techniques of presentation.
 
But of course, the entire high modernist phenomenon is affected.  This
generation of students sees _Ulysses_ as "not worth all the trouble" (much
less, God knows, _Finnegans Wake_), and this attitude spills over into all
the others, including Eliot, Faulkner (who horrified my last year's
undergraduates with his difficulty), etc etc.  I suspect Virginia Woolf's
stock has dropped, with reinstatement of writers like Rebecca West or
Antonia White . . . .
 
                                Stephen Adams
                                Department of English
                                University of Western Ontario
                                London, Canada  N6A-3K7
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