Wei, You write: > Thank you for your remark. I was aware that the Old Testament refers to the > Hebrew scriptures “subsumed into the Christian Bible.” I added that disclaimer to show that I had no intention to offend anyone. On another academic list I frequent, to refer to the hebrew scriptures as the "Old Testament" is politically incorrect. > But what is it > exactly you are saying happened to Pound when he read the Bible. Are you > saying he “read them infernally” as Blake did? Or did he just reject them > outright? I was picking up on your remark about the nature of "vehemence": You had written: " ... my personal conclusion would be that the stated goals of the Cantos and of Pound’s political philosophy imply, BY THEIR VERY VEHEMENCE, their exact opposites." [emphasis supplied] I was suggesting that the very vehemence of the Old Testament seems to have caused Pound's reaction to the god of the OT -- Pound called Jehovah a "maniac god ". >Blake loved to read the Bible, and said that it had to be read > inside out, or by inverting the traditional interpretations, or even by > inverting the sense of the orginal passages. > Are you saying Pound was doing > this too? I was saying we should invert the ordinary interpretation of > Pound’s words, as Blake did when he read Milton and the Bible. No. I don't think Pound would have found this sort of paradoxical mode of interpretation amenable. The conclusion he reached was not that the authors of the OT were a bunch of weily sophisticates, but that the hebrew scriptures are the record of a semi-barbaric tribe of herdsmen. Tim Romano P.S. Please correct my typo in the last sentence. "weily" should read "wily".