Here's another passage from the Paris Review interview with Geoffrey Hill, which list members might find suggestive on the subject of "difficulty" and elitism in literature: "We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when, if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves, we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right - not an obligation - to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it's been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called 'inner exile' in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Heacker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Mayby an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations ... resisting, therefore, tyrannical oversimplification". There seems to me to be a great deal of truth in this, although it doesn't address the question why so many "difficult" poets in the modernist tradition were drawn to authoritarian, antidemocratic political regimes. Perhaps though that is a false question, because on analysis one tends to find that when Pound is being fascist he is not being difficult. He's being fascist when he's sloganising (in ABC of Economics etc), pontificating from the cracker barrel (broadcasts etc), or writing the history of China (China cantos, all of which are addressed to Mussolini, as indicated by the single use of the word "you" on page ***). However muddled his thought may be in many of these writings, they are not "difficult". Richard Edwards ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com