See the just released Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000), edited by Cary Nelson. A web site in support of this project is available at:

Undoubtedly many new students of poetry will encounter Pound and Pound criticism through this vehicle. Among the Pound materials on offer here are "A Retrospect," some pages from Blast, and transcripts of two of Pound's broadcasts.

The site itself is an interesting resource for anyone interested in Pound's work. The relevance to this thread should be obvious. If you teach, love, or hate the work, you will likely find yourself in the position of discussing the politics. Some elucidation, contextualization has become an increasingly unavoidable responsibility for the Pound scholar. At issue in this thread is that few of us are prepared to discuss his politics, and yet we must because the information is now there for new readers. The discussion here of Pound and Fascism allows me to consider the information that I have from new angles; and while it does not allow me to make a pronouncement, it does allow me to direct a student's attention and my own toward a variety of compelling intersections related to the "new" and that other process of "making it new." The poetry can not be separated from the situation: he was an inspired man, a generous man, an intemperate man, and a Fascist. How one negotiates that ideogram has much to do with how one will negotiate much of the modernist canon, for that canon cannot be isolated from the history of modernity with which it had an often antagonistic relation, the instance of Pound's work being the most notable of many.

Don Wellman