It's All About Ezra

Read him in a Lit class last spring. This poem made me smile!

Sorry for your pain LDF (of having to read him), but happy you can smile despite it :-)

Your not the only one.

I found his work to be an exercise in narcissism.

Hey snuggle', Pound was the narcissist of narcissists. Take a look on the net at all the photos he posed for - ridiculous!

Read your poem and thought of this ...

"Pull down thy vanity
                       How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
                       Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
                      I say pull down."

I'd give you the reference but you obviously know it already ...

Thanks for the thought and quote AB; I did not know it but hope to investigate further ...

Hi and thanks for the response ... it's from the Pisan Cantos.  Interesting read but I needed a lot of help ... I used William Cookson's book about the poem.

Hi AB, you're welcome & thanks to you too. I'll have to delve further & appreciate your help. Suppose we're not all bad, even poor mad old Ezra? Regards, S.

This cool chick, Rebecca Beasley, will get you into Ezra big time (she did for me) ... https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/embed/d51af5004e1c80244d01 from here https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ezra-pound.  I also got into him 'cos of an interest in Basil Bunting and Peter Dale Scott.  (Look up Bunting's poem 'On the flyleaf of Pound's canto's https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/fly/page-1/33009/); oh, and don't forget his haiku thing?

How familiar were you with Ezra when you wrote your poem?

Honestly, much thanks Mr, I do have one of those apparently so called open minds. Thanks to your revered friend too. I shall indeed try to delve further, without giving up totally on him (or others for that matter). We all hopefully deserve a second chance or two ...

I've tried reading Ezra a few times, as per Joyce, and I didn't care for either. I also checked out Elliot's Wast Land, liked parts, but subsequently found Pound hacked it to bits and added too much of his own pompousness. Someone described Pound as a "literary peacock", which to me describes him almost perfectly. Check out google images and see all his posing photos. He was a good translator (Dante's Inferno to Pound's Cantos) and an excellent networker (Elliot & Hemingway especially).

I separate artist and their art (e.g Pound's Fascism & his poetry); and try to judge him on his poetry alone, which I don't care for - his obscure references (including linguistic boasting) I find particularly offensive. I think he courted Elliot, because Elliot worked for Faber & Faber (and Elliot wasn't particularly nice to his first wife, not visiting her when she was committed [must separate artist from art again]). I suspect Hemingway recommended Pound for the Bollingen Prize only to save Pound's neck; and think Hemingway learned to write more from his newspaper editors than Pound or Stein.

Brett Whiteley put it it well, when he said, "artists aren't very nice people" [or words to that effect].

Pound, in my mind (and I suspect others) is gravely over-rated, and history will hopefully over time revise him and Joyce and Churchill and others down (where they belong).

However, I will continue to search for truth, and may yet be proved wrong again, fully or partially ...

Did you get a chance to listen to that podcast, btw ?