tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post8038161259374577938..comments2023-06-27T01:34:35.359-07:00Comments on Ted Burke LIKE IT OR NOT: Ezra Pound the Mountebank TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-36293487647009211682014-01-19T07:21:06.891-08:002014-01-19T07:21:06.891-08:00Hello JNagarya. Thanks for the response. I agree w...Hello JNagarya. Thanks for the response. I agree with your general opinion of Pound, who I think was politically reprehensible and one of the worst major poets of the 20th century. Traitor, reactionary, race-baiter, I have no sympathy for a man who's ambition had more to do with having power and influence over whole populations rather than poetry itself. He was, though, an idea man about the craft and art of the poem, and some of his criticism remains relevant. The way we discuss the quality and function of the image and the modifiers that do and do not attend it in context draw heavily from his notions about ridding ourselves of the weight of literary history and devising a poetics that can can help the reader perceive the world in new ways. Pound didn't want ot stop there, of course, he desired to rule the world and aspired to be The Boss. Bully and self-aggrandizing creep he may have been (and traitor) but some of ideas, at least, had value.<br /><br />Eliot was a in league with Pound as anti-semite and race baiting neurotic who disguised his bigotry in a tradition of genteel Classicism, but I will defend him as a poet; too much of his images, his cadences, his drifting allusions hit the mark ; he is one of those writers who had an especially strong gift for getting the elusive essence of alienation , dread, spiritual desolation in a dehumanizing culture in his poems without turning them into padded, freighted dissertations. It is one of the tragedies of contemporary literature that Eliot, whom I think is one of the strongest poets of the last century, should happen to be, politically,a callous and malicious monster. TED BURKEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-84915527515659951192014-01-18T23:10:50.240-08:002014-01-18T23:10:50.240-08:00Pound was a self-hating thug and bullshitting bull...Pound was a self-hating thug and bullshitting bully. He has his pseudo-intellectual knock-off-supremacist admirers. Sicko-phants.<br /><br />Eliot, aside from "Prufrock" and his cat poems, was a charlatan, a fraud. (It was easy for him to get published by Faber: he was an editor at Faber.) Were his complete works -- sans those noted -- published honestly, they would be printed in invisible ink, for that is the weight and merit of their "substance".<br /><br />None of which is a knock on "Modernism," the de-colonization of US literature (Karl Shapiro) from the European and British oppressions, to which latter both Pound and Eliot aligned themselves as anti-democratic expatriates. <br /><br /> JNagaryahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00888822066651495927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-73275913055873312132013-12-01T12:55:14.503-08:002013-12-01T12:55:14.503-08:00Eliot's fascist leanings are all the most insi...Eliot's fascist leanings are all the most insidious because of the excellence of his craft as a poet. I suspect he would be the first to say that one cannot separate the moral value of a writer's content from the skill of his craft. That is why Eliot should be reprehensible to anyone who admires modern-day standards of tolerance and cultural diversity. Eliot utilized the fragmentation and rootlessness of the modern world to highlight his yearning to return to a medieval Christian/monarchist society -- complete with fear and mistrust of Jews and other outsiders. Such a desire is naive at best; at worst, it buys into theories of cultural purity that have genocidal implications. Pound was a nut-job, but at least he couldn't hide his madness behind his art. Pound should be appreciated with care; admiring him is not healthy.Jude D. Rootnoreply@blogger.com