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

[TranquillityBase]

> Understood.  I guess I'd just say he was an honest fascist.

For all I know, Mein Kampf could be a literary treasure xP

I'm aware you're being facetious, but if you're ever curious to find out the answer to your suggestion here, that is, where Mein Kampf stands as a piece of literary work, Ron Rosenbaum wrote an excellent piece about its literary merits (or lack thereof).  I thought it was in his book Explaining Hitler, but I'm not finding it there.  So it must have been published separately.  I can't find it right this moment or I'd send a link.

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Going after either man for anything but the quality of his poetry is irrelevant to me.

What makes you think that his views had no influence on his writing?

His views most certainly had an influence on his Cantos, but his views were not strictly fascist from the beginning.  I'd have to do more research to pinpoint exactly when he crossed that borderline.  Two of the 120 Cantos written at the height of his fascist phase were "suppressed" although I think they may have been reinserted in newer editions.  Or maybe not.  They were written entirely in Italian.

His authoritarianism comes out much more noticeably in his prose writings.  When I recently (recently being about 10 years ago) tried to reread "Guide to Kulchur", it hit me like a ton of bricks.  But I've read the Cantos at least twice and, at least for me, I never detected the stench of fascism.  And I've been a student of fascism since I was about 13.  Again, excepting those two wartime Cantos which I can't read because I've not seen an English translation of them.

All I can do is refer you to the Pisan Cantos.  He may have not apologized, but he certainly records the reckoning that he faced at that point in his life.

Anyway, what I really found interesting is the fact that there are two such divergent streams of poetry that were being written contemporaneously and how i stumbled upon that divergence in my reading of Wallace Stevens.  That was the point I was trying to make.

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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

I think what Pound embraced was not politics, but economics, and he embraced some wild theories that perhaps he saw being implemented in some way in Mussolini's Italy.  But I really don't know without doing more research.  I know there's very little politics in the Cantos, except the politics of Renaissance Italy.

I just ordered the Daniel Swift book and will read it.

As I said to OMG, what I was trying to relay was how I fell into what now feels like a trap in my reading of Wallace Stevens and my reaction to it.  I find his poetry unreadable (in spite of which I will keep reading him because there must be something important I'm missing); I find Pound readable, fascinating (uh-oh....fasci....), educational and inspiring.  Maybe I'm a crypto-fascist after all.  But reading Pound did not lead me to become a neo-Nazi.

Somehow I can't see the Proud Boys sitting around and discussing Pound, but maybe they do.

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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.

Ouch! Another two of my favorites bite the dust.

This has been a enlightening exchange.  

What about James Joyce?  Also gibberish?  Just curious.