'A Negligible or Negative Return'

A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist. I find few writers as distasteful as Pound. My reasons are simple and not at all original. He was rabidly, tediously anti-Semitic and he betrayed his country.

Earlier this year I borrowed Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (ed. Leonard W. Doob, 1978) from the library. I had been aware of the book for a long time but never looked into it. I got morbidly curious and found Pound’s wartime broadcasts even more vile than expected, but also tiresome. We’ve all encountered people maddened with hatred and we avoid them, at least in part out of fear. Such characters are unpredictable. We don’t know when their words will turn into actions. By being broadcast, Pound’s words are action. I browsed among his transcripts but couldn't finish reading even one. Raving by definition is tiresome, unlikely to interest anyone other than the raver.

My Pound-advocating reader, as others have done previously, urges me to ignore the political and racial idiocies and focus on Pound as poet. That strategy doesn’t help his case. I recognize the poetic worth of stray lines and phrases in the Cantos and elsewhere. A copy of the Cantos sits on a nearby shelf and critics I admire – Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport – virtually beatify Pound among twentieth-century poets. I don’t get it. Trying to understand Pound’s chaotic writing isn’t worth the effort. His mandarin contempt for common readers and other poets has had a devastating impact on the art for more than a century. The late Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, in an interview published in 2004 in The Poetry Ireland Review, speaks for me:

“[W]illful obscurity I disdain, not least because it arrogantly assumes rights to so much of the reader's meagre life-span, demanding absurdly large investments of time for what is usually a negligible or negative return.

“One reason why much of the greatest poetry is so uncannily and transparently clear (and I don't mean facile) is because it is a record of those rare, transfixing moments when some normally opaque corner of existence is unveiled and we are granted a fleeting glimpse into ‘the heart of things.’ Poetry draws on depths of emotion and reserves of wisdom that are plumbed by instinctive, almost primitive, means – the opposite of conscious ‘cleverality.’”