geeze.... this oughtta be worth about 73 rebuttals from wei..... In a message dated 07/21/2000 8:36:23 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << No offence to Sarah Holmes Naturally anyone who had read Pound quickly realises that he utterly detested The Bank of France because it is a bank, surely list members know his list of violent lines contra banks & morbid interest charges, usura etc What has made the Cantos and his other writings singular is the level of economic subject matter treated poetically without 'poeticisms', he never wrote an Ode to a Greacian Bank for obvious reasons similarly he hated most if not all Politicos specifically US ones. He pursued alienation and martyrdom which successfully had him dumped in a looney bin, if one examines Julien Cornell's book on the trial of EP there is the ghost of a chance that the poet may have been executed without an insanity plea & the psychiatric assessments of Pound pre-trial are a good dilution of his views and opinions presented in acceptably legal jargon there seems to be an amount of pussy footing and softly-softly approach to Pound's work from some list members, as it were, discussing Pound for the easily offended and democratically biased If one can interpret him, he was naturally anti-Democratic and why the hell not Many critics attempt to sanitize Pound's 'philosophy' and render him a bold outspoken brat merely, he did hate what he hated and with a vengeance Why is the applied American Constitution so exalted when it is so far from the spirit of the said document (generalization) Why can't En Lin Wei understand that Pound's vision of a justly political and lovingly humane society cannot have been Pres. Wilson's one since any school kid learns that the Peace of Versailles sowed the seeds of WWII. Pound didn't expect anything less of an American President than full commitment to effecting the highest ideals of the Constitution which include regulating the rotten monetary scene, the arms industry, wage slavery, unfair taxation & numerous societal inequalities, diseconomies & evils Does anyone on the list believe that a poet is fuelled by hatred as much as other emotional drives and that Pound who never Found a political system to his liking, despite the dangerous flirtation with National Socialism and Fascism in word but not in deed, remained apolitical and a student of many theoretical models for the outlining of an ideal utopian society? Finally, what he stated on Rome radio in horrendous anti-Semitic terms, he fully retracted later, however in a post-Holocaust world such a retraction is seen as insignificant hence the Pound centenary in 1985 was a muted celebration in his native continent and he remains uncommemorated in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, London after a recent disbarrment. >>