Dear Listmembers,

As the most recent posts to this list demonstrate, Pound has often attracted
individuals who are more interested in politics than poetry.

Mr. Wei's contributions, in particular, are representative of a whole class
of people who are totally insensible to poetry, and who attempt to cover up
this defect by commenting on anything other than poetry. From such people we
often hear that Pound's poetry and politics are "intimately linked" and that
one can never talk of one without the other: the result of such an attitude
being that politics is chiefly, if not exclusively, discussed. Ezra Pound, to
Mr. Wei and a host of others, is simply a subject to digress from.

Thus, Wei's main objection to Pound's poetic reputation (like Shapiro,
Casillo, Surette et al) is his political sympathies. Wei, in one posting,
writes:

"Today, as hundreds remain in jail in Philadelphia, simply for protesting
against the plutocratic practices of the Republican party, we might well
consider the degree to which freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are
under serious threat.  Which side would Pound be on?  (Did he ever side with
ANY demonstrators who protested the rule of Mussolini?  Did he ever side
with any trade union organization which protested labor conditions in the US
or in Italy, during the era of fascism?"

Are poets to be judged on whether they supported trade unions? Does Ezra
Pound's reputation as a poet suffer because he was fond of John Adams? The
stupidity of this line of thought verges on the comical, until one is
reminded that a fair number of intellectuals (particularly in academia) share
such sentiments. One must pity these bores, since the majority of Modernist
poets were conservative or right-wing (Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Frost) and seemed
unmoved by the leftist pieties of their day.

I must, in closing, thank Mr. Wei however. Though his crude leftist polemics
are highly unoriginal, as Mr. Hatlen points out, he has taken the stance to
such an extreme that even the naive reader now sees the utter contemptibility
of the project. The criticism of poets by political standards, an approach
now well under way in academia, has reached an intellectual nadir and will
hopefully never recover. History will certainly show that, far from being
advocates of the liberal tradition, Wei and Casillo (and not a few on this
list) were enemies of literature whose critical standards branded them the
disreputable children of Stalin.

Regards,

Garrick Davis
Contemporary Poetry Review
(www.cprw.com)