Pound vs. Eliot

[rayheinrich]

Ray, good points all around. However, with any kind of literature, barring things like surrealist automatic writing, the dichotomy between reader and writer is tenuous at best. I know Barthes' did a lot to argue that the reader is the one who really constitutes the meaning of a text, and had some compelling things to say. Even so, there evidently is such a thing as writerly mastery. The mere fact of revision demands that we see as much.

Maybe I'll have to give Eliot a more earnest and in depth go.

OMG, not as far as Barth.
Remember that writers are readers of their own work, especially when revising.
More like:
"A poem is written first in its writer's language.
When you read it, you are translating it into your own language.
Which act requires more skill and creativity,
depends on the individual writer or reader."
- George Steiner (? not sure)

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'd read the poetry of Genghis if he wrote it and it was good shit, i'm not bothered what a poets leanings/callings are.
...
a poet is a poet is a poet, and while his experience may taint his poetry i'm fine with it. i can look at a poem and say "no, this poem disgusts me" and stop reading it. i'm not bothered about the soul or anything else of the poet, if i were i'd only read poetry from women with big tits and lots of money.
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lets say hitler wrote a poem a really good poem but never signed it, could you stop loving the poem if you found out who the author was.
...

Well said.
And that you said it using Genghis and tits and Hitler
is both poetically ironic and ironically poetic.