richard, good reply ...am pretty green at this stuff, so please forgive the howlers tend to want to divide ep between "personae" and "cantos" as apprentice & master work, is this basically right? and, along those lines, read cantos, genre-wise, cognate with don juan. thence, the byronic ethos is the controlling trope, no? the anti-thesis to eliot & keats. so, if not narcissist, how about feminist? bob -----Original Message----- From: Richard Edwards <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 4:36 AM Subject: Re: A summary for Richard Caddel >I agree there are aspects of Pound's character that are distinctly >narcissistic. The narcissism is evident in the early poems (though not, to >my mind, in Propertius or Cathay); Mauberley takes a self-critical glance at >this kind of self-regarding poesy, as the aesthetic style of the '90s is >brutally rebutted by the War. Oddly, I don't see the Cantos as a >narcissistic poem at all. Pound was aiming rather higher than mere >"self-expression" and fantasy. > >Whilst Pound the man clearly held a high opinion of himself in many >respects, he was not prone to praising his own work and was unusually >selfless in the pursuit of recognition for others. This observation is of >course a commonplace in discussions about Pound but it is nonetheless true >and we should not lose sight of it. > >It seems to me that a reader who is determined to indulge his or her own >"personal poet manque narcissism" will succeed in doing so whatever >particular poet he or she happens to be reading. I don't see how Pound's >work can be said to lend itself particularly to that kind of abuse. Surely >the work of, say, John Berryman is a far richer source of titillation for >the narcissistic poet manque than Pound's is. > >When exactly did the "age of narcissism" begin? 4000 BC? > >Richard Edwards