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- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
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Wed, 28 Jun 2000 20:34:43 EDT
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very well put.  to deal with Pound in the context of his time, and not by
projecting the present time into the past, is to see him for the human being
he was.  this dimension has been sorely missing in many of the "treatments"
of Pound that have peppered the list lately.

joe...

In a message dated 06/28/2000 6:50:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<<
 Tim Romano wrote:

 >
 > To demonize Pound by linking him to the harsh political acts/sins against
 > mankind/atrocities/draconian measures (however one wishes to characterize
 > them) of the leaders, ancient and modern, whom Pound chooses to exalt for
 > some quality or qualities they possessed, gives the false impression that
 > Pound was not a product of his times; it suggests that his views were so
 > exterme that he was on the fringes. But these views were common, almost
 > "mainstream."  The record of these times has been distorted and purged.

 This whole post is of extreme interest, but I wish only to expand on a couple
 of points. To put this paragraph another way, in order to conceal the tracks
 of racism and authoritarianism in u.s. imperialism it is necessary to
demonize
 Pound and others and (as Tim notes below) actually conceal the existence
 of some writers. Back in the era of Trumanism (misnamed McCarthyism)
 great fun was had by all in reference to Soviet rewriting of history. The
 process Tim describes in this post is much more democratic or at least
 more sophisticated. Some of that history is being dug up however,
 revealing that eugenics was not only a "scientific" position but embodied
 in the actual proceedings of a number of state governments -- and even
 in social-democratic Sweden. Pound has nothing over Woodrow Wilson
 as a racist. And when someone "accused" Eisenhower of being Jewish,
 his response was not "SoWhat!" but "THAT'S A LIE!" In the late
 1960s Princess Margaret at a banquet given in her honor by Mayor
 Daley of Chicago was overheard dismissing the Irish as dirty like
 pigs. And the Blackfoot Nation is attempting to sue Canada for the
 genocidal special boading schools into which for half a century they
 kidnapped Indian children. (The schools, many of them church-
 operated, do fit fairly closely the definitions of genocide in international
 treaties.) The U.S. while keeping Pound in the Pisan DTC was
 dismantling the local governments established by peasants in  Korea
 after the defeat of Japan and replacing them with the quislings who had
 served the Japanese. Shoot Quisling in Norway -- make his Korean
 equivalent, Synghman Rhee, dictator of Korea. Pound is right for
 the wrong reasons about the various war-crimes trials.

 > Other artists have been long ignored, their works allowed to go out of
print
 > or rot in basements. I spent 8 years studying literature, from the late
'70s
 > through the mid '80s and did not see the name of the painter and
 > man-of-letters Wyndham Lewis mentioned even once in any course description,
 > or hear his name mentioned by any teacher or colleague --the man whom T.S.
 > Eliot called "the greatest prose writer of my generation"-- and when I did
 > learn about Lewis, it was impossible to find copies of his many works
 > anywhere; in some instances, the works had been removed from the shelves.

 I find this astounding. The marxist critic Frederick Jameson wrote a book on
 Wyndham Lewis. I haven't read it, but I would agree with what I understand
 was one of its theses, that we have something to learn from the artists who
 celebrated Fascism. Fascism was a strange blend. In its material existence
 it had no ideology  but was completely arbitrary. It *needed*, however,
 the appearance of an ideology, and the first-rate writers (Lewis and Pound
 not the only ones) who in a sense provided that ideology are important.
 This is another way of saying that the Mussolini of the Cantos both is
 and (more importantly) is *not* the Mussolini of history.

 Consider the lines:

             Adolf furious from perception.
                     But there is a blindness that comes from inside --
             they try to explain themselves out of nullity.
                                     (104/761 [1998 printing])

 Adolf does not deserve the compliment -- but it is still a profoundly true
 insight into the lives of many in the last century. I am battling now on
 another list with two political friends who are being drive to a blind fury
 by their perception of the facts of global warming. It is not impossible that
 some like them may end up supporters of some new Fuerher.

 > I
 > happen to know that rare scientific works on eugenics are being removed
from
 > the shelves of a major university to be stored offsite, not in a special
 > archive, but in an area devoted to superseded or discredited volumes which
 > are destined eventually for the incinerator, while the pulp fiction section
 > is growing larger. There's a painting by Augustus John of the South African
 > poet Roy Campbell locked away in a basement in an art museum in Pittsburgh
 > PA, where it has been out of sight for maybe 40 years. e.e. cumming's work
 > EIMI is also out of print.  Pound's translation of Moscardino is out of
 > print.
 >
 > If I had the broadcasts to hand, I would cite the passage where Pound
writes
 > that it does not matter what the artist believes he is making or doing; if
 > he sincerely reports what his eyes are observing, his works will reflect
the
 > times.

 "Reflect" is almost too weak here. The future will not be too wrong if in
 looking back on this and the last century, trying to make sense of the
 long fallen U.S. empire, they take the Cantos as their guide. Nor would
 "Furious from perception" be an unfair epitaph for Pound himself --
 see the earlier lines:

                         and the light became so bright and so blindin'
             in this layer of paradise
                         that the mind of man was bewildered.
                                             (38/190)
 It seems to me that a poet who sees so much is forgiveable for being
 such a fucking fool in his interpretation of what he saw. And  if one
 focuses on it in this way, there is less a conflict than is often assumed
 by both his friends and enemies between the "aestehtics" of Pound's
 poem and its substance -- nor is so necessary to labor painfully to
 separate what one approves of and what one disapproves of in the
 poem's substance.

 Carrol Cox

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