At 10:42 PM -0400 8/29/99, Brett Zombro wrote:
 
>Carolyn See may be an idiot, and there's no excuse for some
>of the sloppy journalism there, but is her dismissive attitude
>toward the Cantos really atypical?  It seems like there is a norm in
>popular journalistic writing about  Pound which goes
>something along the lines of "one of the
>century's great poets, who made important contributions to
>blah, blah, blah... but hardly anyone reads him and no wonder --
>who would want to bother with such difficult... blah, blah,
>incoherent blah in blah-teen different languages... and anyway
>he was a crypto-modernist-fascist traitor to boot."
 
I dare say that this attitude is not restricted to journalists. I've heard
much the same from English professors at major universities (or the
variant, "who's that poet that helped Eliot with The Waste Land and later
went insane?")
 
The fact that Pound's carries the double curse of being "difficult" and
being politically incorrect offers a handy excuse to anyone who doesn't
want to read him.
 
Sigh.
 
 
 
William Cole, Assistant Director
Computers in Composition and Literature
Department of English
The Ohio State University
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