Sorry, I think hotmail overrode the EPOUND reply thing, so all the replies were sent to my academic email account rather than the list; below are the two replies to my original post. Rich To: [log in to unmask] From: "Von Underwood" <[log in to unmask]> It may seem disingenuous at first for me to say to, but it may be that Pound was not a Romantic because he didn't want to be one. He may have had a slanted, and inaccurate view of them, but there were others he wanted to emulate more than the Romantics, stylistically and otherwise. I thiknk perhaps one difference between Pound and the Romantics might be an attitude toward tradition, something Pound saw as a positive force, when it was working properly, but that some Romantics might have found an impediment to their rather more individulistic sense of the sublime. Having had enough of a sort of late Victorian schwarmeriei, I suspent he made have chalked off a few romatics as a probably source of the degradation. Hence Pound is drawn to a classicism, seen as a concentration of power effected by perfection of form, and there is in Pound a kind of faith in a deep structure, there to be recovered in Jefferson and in Kung Fu Tzu, as if our modern trouble were that we had lost the abiltiy to get it right, glimpsed so much more clearly by significant antecedents. In a way, Pound really wanted there to be culture and civilizatiion, to lift people up, in a way that may link him more to Hobbes than to Rousseau. The romanitic impulse might be to set just Pounds sort of notion of culture and tradition aside, and see what happens. This isn't to say their aren.t some interesting formal comparision between Roantic Ode and the Cantos, even if they might have given Pound some discomfort. I am sorry for approaching this in such amanner, but perhaps it will help to get some discussion on your point rolling. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Pound and Eliot wanted to reinvent the poet as knower that the Romantics/Wordworth had established. The Cantos explore all of history's heros and eternal verities in an attempt to do that, one of the reasons he felt he had failed to "write Paradise." -Grace Davis _________________________________________________________________ Stay in touch with absent friends - get MSN Messenger http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger