"Close textual analysis" is of course what all critics ought to be good at,
and the insights such analysis yields are what in the end makes literary
criticism worthwhile. But close textual analysis without more is not and
never has been enough. Surely Pound's work is an excellent example of why
that should be the case. The idea of trying to read, say, the Pisan Cantos
in a state of deliberate ignorance of the life and opinions of their author
is quite frankly ridiculous. And once you recognise the relevance or
potential relevance of biographical detail, then it becomes the scholar's
duty to be accurate, especially where moral judgments are inevitably
involved. Poetry does on occasions engage the reader's ethical or moral
faculties and one does not have to be a "moral critic" to recognise that
Pound's work does this in a particularly challenging way, because of the
nature of some of the views which he voiced in his writing.
 
One of the greatest masters of textual analysis was Sir William Empson,
whose works include not only "Seven Types of Ambiguity", "The Structure of
Complex Words" and "Some Versions of Pastoral" but also "Using Biography".
It was he who exploded the notion, peddled by some of the New Critics (with
whom Empson otherwise had much in common), that the intentions of the author
are irrelevant to a true understanding of a poem. If that were so, why would
anyone bother attempting to establish authentic texts?
 
I wonder what members of this list would have to talk about if discussions
of Pound's life and opinions were excluded as being contrary to list
etiquette? I suppose we could swap sensitive appreciations of "In a Station
in the Metro" (taking care not to mention the fact that Pound once lived in
Paris)... Is that really what Garrick Davis wants?
 
Richard Edwards
 
 
>From: Garrick Davis <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>  <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Pound & Fascism
>Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 02:27:04 EST
>
>     The never-ending discussion of Pound's fascism and anti-Semitism,
>which
>this listserver indulges in and which is the sole focus of Poundian
>criticism
>lately, raises several questions.
>
>     1. What important insights or critical judgments has such an approach
>discovered?
>
>     I would maintain very few. Such an approach all too often leads to
>primitive moralizing. Either Pound was an idiotic crank or a truly evil
>man,
>so the theory divides. How could Pound the idiotic crank also be Pound the
>brilliant inventor of 20th century poetry? How could Pound the Nazi
>Jew-baiter write the "Ballad of the Goodly Fere"? No answers are
>forthcoming
>from these moral critics. Need it be added that when a critical approach
>leads neither to a richer nor more just understanding of the poetry, it is
>bankrupt?
>
>A distinction should be made here: many of the participants to this
>listserver seem fascinated by Pound the man, but indifferent to Pound's
>poetry. This I infer from their letters, which are invariably biographical
>and obsessed with marginalia. One can either dismiss this industry as
>superfluous or complement it as scholarship, though of a pedestrian
>variety.
>But it is a mere hobby if pursued without serious purpose. Poetry is, after
>all, the only reason Pound remains of permanent interest.
>     Such academic seashell-collecting has always struck the average reader
>as
>pointless. It is worse than this, I fear; it is actively harmful, in so far
>as the accumulation of useless facts and disconnected insights helps to
>obscure their superiors: those useful facts and insights which contribute
>to
>the formation of literary judgment. A thousand mediocre books are quite
>capable of hiding, on the dusty shelves, a dozen good books from their
>proper
>readers: a phenomenon that any visitor to a research library can attest to.
>Gresham's Law (that phony currency drives out the good) surely exists today
>and applies to our publishing lists and libraries.
>
>2. What conclusions can be drawn from this obsession with Pound's fascist
>and
>anti-Semitic sympathies?
>
>The underlying assumption concerning this basically moral (and, I should
>add,
>rather traditional) approach to criticism is that to understand the work
>one
>must understand the man. Biographical facts will lead to textual insights.
>This critical approach was banished, all too briefly, by the New Criticism
>in
>the early decades of this century. And all the objections to this approach,
>as formulated by that movement, remain valid to this day. It has been used
>admirably by a few critics, and disastrously by many others. Is it sheer
>coincidence that the Golden Age of modern criticism (an era which contained
>Eliot, Pound, Blackmur, Tate, Ransom, Auden, to name a very few) was an age
>which distrusted the moral/biographical/historical approaches to criticism
>and preferred close textual analysis of the work instead?
>
>This leads to a last, bitter truth: many of our academic scholars have
>produced defective criticism (harnessed, paradoxically, to excellent
>scholarship) because they are ignorant of the most basic critical
>approaches.
>That is, our universities produce literary scholars unfamiliar with the
>great
>American critics.  How many of our Poundian critics have read our great
>critics of poetry like Poe, Mencken, James, Santayana, Tate, Eliot, Pound,
>Jarrell, Auden,  Blackmur, Jarrell, Wilson, and Winters...not to mention
>our
>good critics like Trilling, Warren, Wimsatt, Matthiessen,  Burke, Crane,
>and
>Brooks? How many of our scholars have even heard of Saintsbury or Gourmont?
>Having read none of the great criticism of the past century (or of any
>century for that matter) what wonder that they reproduce the stupidities of
>mediocre critics?
>
>     Perhaps our scholars (including some on this listserver) should ask
>themselves what any further elucidation of Pound's political/moral/social
>sympathies will contribute to the understanding of his poetry. I would
>think
>this to be, for the critic or scholar of poetry, a matter of first
>principles.
>
>Regards,
>Garrick Davis
>Contemporary Poetry Review
>(www.cprw.com)
>
 
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