If I may intrude my ignorance into this learned discussion one more time... EP's "anti-semitism" seems to me a much more complicated matter than either his defenders or detractors appear to realize. 1.From his earliest letters, poems & articles, EP had an "anti-Judaic" positition,but I don't think this qualifies as "anti-semitic" because it was part of his general "anti-monotheist" stance, and (I think) always appears as part of a general rejection of Chrisitianity, Judaism and Islam --"all this Xtian-Jew-Moslem bunk"as he sez in one place. (Selected Leters) B. In a 1919 aritcle,EP says he prfers the Jews to the Xtians and Moslems because they haven't started a religious war in 2000 years (Selected Prose) C.The anti-monotheist position seems part of that aspect of EP which comes closest to conventional "liberalism": he dislikes monotheism because it appears historically linked to intolerance. [Okay: he also disliked monotheism on poetic grounds. His type of multilinguistic/multicultural sensibility resonated more to polytheistic imagery than to monotheistic abstraction or to Hindic monist abstraction.] 2. In the 1930s, Pound repudiated anti-semitism specifically and precisely in several places. Having joined the anti-banker radicals as distinct from the anti-free-market radicals, Pound found he had a lot of anti-semitic allies. He was not quickly seduced by them. His 1930-1940 writings include several explicit rejectons of generalized anti-semitism, usually on the grounds that "the poorJews"were not responsible for the Rothschilds, and twice on the grounds that the worst "usurers" (money-coiners) were not all Jews and once on the grounds that some of them were "Aryan" -- a sarcastic repudiation of Hitler's ideas. (Collected Letters, Cantos, Terrel's Companion to the Cantos.) 3. From about 1940 to somewhere in the 1960s EP clearly and unambigously expressed uncritical (bigoted) anti-semitism on many, many occasions. Only rarely did he pull back to the (relatively sane) position of only blaming certain banking families. He raved and ranted against "the Jews" in general. Some consider this immoral; some consider it insane; I can see some truth in both perspectives. 4.From sometime in the 1960s (date unknown to me: I wd love to be informed by one of the more learned members of this list ) EP repudiated his anti-semitism. (See especially his interview with Allen Ginsberg) He then became silent, either in clinical depression (psychiatric view) or as pennance (religious view.) In either case, the punishment inflicted upon him by the US govt was continued by self-punishment. 5. The anti-monotheist position disappeared around the same time as the anti-semitism. The religious imagery of Pound's paradise cantos very carefully remains non-sectarian, open to both monotheist and polytheist readings. This letter does not arrive at a verdict, and does not intend to move others toward a verdict or toward abandonning thier previous verdicts. I merely wish to share my own sense of the complexity and tragedy of Pound's "errors and wrecks." Most of the Cantos seem to me neither error nor wreck..... Most humbly, mark chan [log in to unmask] That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services whcih mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put "common sense" where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dust cannister labeled "discarded nonsense." Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences Las die Lasagne weiter fliegen! ~