The never-ending discussion of Pound's fascism and anti-Semitism, which this listserver indulges in and which is the sole focus of Poundian criticism lately, raises several questions. 1. What important insights or critical judgments has such an approach discovered? I would maintain very few. Such an approach all too often leads to primitive moralizing. Either Pound was an idiotic crank or a truly evil man, so the theory divides. How could Pound the idiotic crank also be Pound the brilliant inventor of 20th century poetry? How could Pound the Nazi Jew-baiter write the "Ballad of the Goodly Fere"? No answers are forthcoming from these moral critics. Need it be added that when a critical approach leads neither to a richer nor more just understanding of the poetry, it is bankrupt? A distinction should be made here: many of the participants to this listserver seem fascinated by Pound the man, but indifferent to Pound's poetry. This I infer from their letters, which are invariably biographical and obsessed with marginalia. One can either dismiss this industry as superfluous or complement it as scholarship, though of a pedestrian variety. But it is a mere hobby if pursued without serious purpose. Poetry is, after all, the only reason Pound remains of permanent interest. Such academic seashell-collecting has always struck the average reader as pointless. It is worse than this, I fear; it is actively harmful, in so far as the accumulation of useless facts and disconnected insights helps to obscure their superiors: those useful facts and insights which contribute to the formation of literary judgment. A thousand mediocre books are quite capable of hiding, on the dusty shelves, a dozen good books from their proper readers: a phenomenon that any visitor to a research library can attest to. Gresham's Law (that phony currency drives out the good) surely exists today and applies to our publishing lists and libraries. 2. What conclusions can be drawn from this obsession with Pound's fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies? The underlying assumption concerning this basically moral (and, I should add, rather traditional) approach to criticism is that to understand the work one must understand the man. Biographical facts will lead to textual insights. This critical approach was banished, all too briefly, by the New Criticism in the early decades of this century. And all the objections to this approach, as formulated by that movement, remain valid to this day. It has been used admirably by a few critics, and disastrously by many others. Is it sheer coincidence that the Golden Age of modern criticism (an era which contained Eliot, Pound, Blackmur, Tate, Ransom, Auden, to name a very few) was an age which distrusted the moral/biographical/historical approaches to criticism and preferred close textual analysis of the work instead? This leads to a last, bitter truth: many of our academic scholars have produced defective criticism (harnessed, paradoxically, to excellent scholarship) because they are ignorant of the most basic critical approaches. That is, our universities produce literary scholars unfamiliar with the great American critics. How many of our Poundian critics have read our great critics of poetry like Poe, Mencken, James, Santayana, Tate, Eliot, Pound, Jarrell, Auden, Blackmur, Jarrell, Wilson, and Winters...not to mention our good critics like Trilling, Warren, Wimsatt, Matthiessen, Burke, Crane, and Brooks? How many of our scholars have even heard of Saintsbury or Gourmont? Having read none of the great criticism of the past century (or of any century for that matter) what wonder that they reproduce the stupidities of mediocre critics? Perhaps our scholars (including some on this listserver) should ask themselves what any further elucidation of Pound's political/moral/social sympathies will contribute to the understanding of his poetry. I would think this to be, for the critic or scholar of poetry, a matter of first principles. Regards, Garrick Davis Contemporary Poetry Review (www.cprw.com)