Michael, you ask Bob if there is a "logical culmination of romanticism? I would answer, yes. It is called for the poet death at a very young and tender age, the Chatterton syndrome, a feat which Pound failed to accomplish. Less facetiously, Michael, you are on to something by pegging Pound as the failed romantic, not because he didn't put forth a sterling effort in overcoming his American inferiority complex with a bloated ego in the presence of the haut cultur de Europena but largely because he lived in a destitute time, in fact the deepest midnight of the destitute night of the Kali Yuga. Bob was getting at this it in his last posting. So re-interpretation of Pound outside this "romantic" attempt to bring Dionysus up out of the Grund to where he once lead, thyrsus in hand, the seasonal water- freeing dance of renewal is simply irrelevant to anything of importance to Pound or his times. We only hope to see as Heidegger did that in this age of ours, "In the age of the world's night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured." And Pound did experience and endure two world wars, incarceration in an open monkey cage, and the government's official nut-house. Furthermore, Heidegger adds, "Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning." To those many individuals who have no vision of anything he must then appear as absolutely a nut-case whether he is conjuring up Athena's wisdom or Confucius's "heavenly order" for these things mean nothing to those folks and their age and won't until there is a turn from the darkness. The political choices of the 1930's and 1940's were largely a choice between one feuilletonistic slogan over another. To keep the discussion on this political level is to continue to skim the surface of Pound and poetry in the 20th. Cent. and to continue stating the obvious which will continue to elicit the same remark over again- SO WHAT? Pound's destiny as a poet was to attempt to turn on the lights of divine radience so the gods would once again take up an abode in everything. He may still prove to have been a significant contributor to this effort, but we are no where near out of this age, an age that devours everything in its darkness including its own criticism. CDM