Striking a familiar posture, Lee Lady once again assures us that he ain't no academic. He ain't original, either. In _Sexual Personae_, Camille Paglia is all loud brag about the daring originality of her insights into Emily Dickinson -- insights that nevertheless managed to visit the professional scholars half a century before they lit on Camille. Anthony Burgess runs through the same child-of-nature routine about himself in _Re: Joyce_. And then there's Ezra Pound, whose relationship with the academy was much more vexed and much more interesting. About that I wonder: would it be productive to shelve the cornpone Old Ez persona of the letters alongside Davy Crockett, Will Rogers, the 19th-century Bowery orator Mike Walsh, and other political writers whose personae gave literary form to wordless anti-intellectualism? Walt Whitman's language emerged from that political tradition -- emerged and then left it behind. But what about Pound? Jonathan Morse