Louis, You write, "I don't even feel the sort of rhetorical insinuation demonstrated in Charles's text, to exist in Pound's prose, which for the most part eagerly embraces the "plain reader" in an effort to educate him/her. I agree with your assessment of Pound's prose, but what are you insinuating about mine? I thought I was making myself clear to you and others reading this list whether I asked rhetorical questions or not. I was trying to characterize a state of mind which has been prejudiced by a past propaganda which is no longer useful for anything except as red herring but was never true as propaganda usually is not. Your remark, "Charles, you remind me...of how a lot of Wagner's family descendants were Hitler enthusiasts" was insinuating. But then I consider you may have some all-American preconceptions of your own. Incidently, Wagner and also his family as well as Hitler and Himmler were all fond of the Grail legend. I am too, and I personally don't feel the least guilty about it. Even Steven Spielberg likes it. You are right about Pound's rhetoric. He didn't insinuate. He spoke out clearly and without restraint like in his letter to the Alumni Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania. "P.S. All the U. of P. or your god damn college or any other god damn American college does or will do for a man of letters is ask him to go away without breaking the silence." What do you bet there are still those who would prefer the silence or at least the familiar conditioned responses? But if you are planning to teach a course on Pound why don't you start with that letter and see where it will take you and the class by the end of the semester? You might also begin with a statement from Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art". He wrote (forget for a moment his biography) "To be sure, people speak of immortal works of art and of art as an eternal value. Speaking this way means using that language which does not trouble with precision in all essential matters, for fear that in the end to be precise would call for-thinking. And is there any greater fear today than that of thinking? Does this talk of immortal works and the eternal value of art have any content or substance? Or are these merely the half-baked cliches of an age when great art, together with its nature, has departed from among men?" Respectively submitted, CDM