[log in to unmask] wrote: > > I assume by "our interpretation" that you're referring to yourself and Carrol > Cox. ????? I see that I somewhat unguardedly stepped into the middle of some battles that have been raging and of which I'm not wholly aware. Perhaps a couple observations will help give context to my remarks. First, a geneal point: By the age of 40 what used to be called one's "sensibility" (see Blackmur's essays) is pretty well formed, and even very radical changes in one's "world view" at that point are not apt to have much of an impact on one's responses to literature. The result of such a change on my part is that all or almost all of the writers with whom I am most deeply familiar and whose work I respond to with most pleasure are also writers whose "world view" is radically different from my own. I am not engaged in or a part of any campaign against Pound. I can open the work almost at random and find myself lost in its pages. On another level, I do find the poem to be profoundly consonant with the drive of u.s. capitalist and imperialist culture -- and his specific anti-u.s. opinions don't change that fundamental consonance. He may have personally despised FDR and adored Mussolini -- but that is superficial to the fact that either of those figures constitutes an exemplification of the thrust of the poem. They are both representative figures of the "Free World." Free World as in Phil Och's fine lines: But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay (I.e.: The rhetoric for 50 years now has pretty clearly identified "free" with "non-communist." Hence Hitler and Mussolini belong to the "free world."_ Carrol Cox