A funny thing happened on the way to Wallace Stevens' later poetry

[busker]

tbf I think it's rather ymmv. I'm comfortable listening to/reading the libretti of Wagner still, but I see Eliot (whom I've read a lot more than Pound) as a nasty, nasty ghost to be exorcised. Then again, there's a big difference with the way only nutters nowadays don't have some reservations with Wagner and his antisemitism, and with the way Pound's politics continue to be casually dismissed, or even suppressed, especially considering that much of the suppression of knowledge of his politics during his lifetime was essentially the same movement as resistance to, say, desegregation. Reading the essay you linked, with the perspectives around and of Pound and Stevens being described: where Stevens eschews politics entirely, Pound effectively claims it to be central -- and what exactly was Pound's politics, if not to see as inferior myself (a Filipino), or to demonize the likes of Harold Bloom (a Jew)? The question in the essay is framed as that between Pound's Modernism and Stevens's evolved Romanticism, to which I'd ask: why assign the age to the auspices of either of those writers, anyway? is the 20th century to be the age of Mussolini or Roosevelt?

Also not sure how honest Pound was when he essentially faked insanity to avoid treason trials xD

https://www.thenation.com/article/archiv...ics/tnamp/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23105029

At the heart of all this is the bigger question of whether artists, as a class, should be the untermensch
Throughout history, artists have been a sort of slave class, turning out an ode here in praise of the sovran, painting a teenage nude there for a lecherous, syphilitic old noble oozing pus and slime. The true genii, such as Leonardo, rightly held their engineering above their art, and indeed, used the latter as an instrument of the former.
Plato wouldn't have any poetry. Nor would he admit any into his akademi who did not know geometry.
The prophet of Islam wouldn't have any either.

Because art acts upon the emotions, much as a prostitute acts upon the limbic system. It is the opposite of knowledge, of what makes us different from a paramecium.
In modern history, all degenerates have been artists and poets. The great emancipators and problem solvers have been scientists (lest one points out the example of Josef Mengele, he earned his PhD in anthropology, at a time when medicine had no maths in it), lawyers, or businesspersons.

Pound was a special case amongst the untermensch
I am automatically suspicious of any Anglophone celebrity since Shakespeare. Living in the Anglosphere, their talents are magnified out of proportion. There was a time not so long ago when Bobby Moore was a star. Now look at Mbappe.
Specifically, Pound was famous because he came from a distinguished American family, landed in Fitzrovia, and mixed with the cream of literary society at a time when being American was both exotic and comfortable for the Brits, like a racially acceptable orangoutan in monkey society. That's why America seeps into so much of PG Wodehouse. That was before Chic-fil-A was a thing. It was his proximity to a small handful of eminences of the time that sealed his fame.

Nothing he ever wrote made any sense.
At least, Hopkins was a genuine striver for the truth in all things. Pound was a hack. Like Emily Dickinson, his fame is entirely undeserved, and people read him today because they think there's something profound in his gibberish. Like with Conrad.

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Note that I don't think prose writers are artists. Prose is prose, as it should be.