IM Ezra Pound 1 Nov 1972
Graham J Weeks
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
Ezra Pound , Homage to Sextus Propertius
--
Graham J Weeks M.R.Pharm.S.
http://www.weeks-g.dircon.co.uk/ Graham's Homepage
8788 quotes 627 topics 2014 authors indexed 658 links
http://www.grace.org.uk/churches/ealing.html Our church
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A free church, a holy nation - Abraham Kuyper
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The Sanity Inspector
I have never known a man, of any nationality, to live so long out of
his native country without seeming to settle anywhere else.
-- T. S. Eliot, 'Ezra Pound', in Walter Sutton ed., _Ezra Pound A
Collection of Critical Essays_
I see they call me Mussolini's boy. I only saw the bastard once. No
German or Italian was ever in position to give me an order. So I took
none. But a German near my home at Rapallo told me they were paying
good money for broadcasts. That was a fatal mistake.
-- Pound, referring to the start of his Italian broadcasts, in Charles
Norman, _Ezra Pound_
How did it go in the madhouse? Rather badly. But what other place
could one live in America?
-- ibid, on his imprisonment in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in ibid
Pound has spent his life trying to live down a family scandal: he's
Longfellow's grand-nephew.
-- D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Graves
You made your great mistake when you abandoned the poetry business,
and set up shop as a wizard in general practice. You wrote, in your
day, some very good verse, and I had the pleasure, along with other
literary buzzards, of calling attention to it at the time. But when
you fell into the hands of those London logrollers, and began to
wander through pink fogs with them, all your native common sense oozed
out of you, and you set up a caterwauling for all sorts of brummagem
Utopias, at first in the aesthetic region only but later in the
regions of political and aesthetic baloney. Thus a competent poet was
spoiled to make a tinhorn politician.
-- H. L. Mencken, letter to Ezra Pound, Nov. 28, 1936
Any poet born in this century or in the last ten years of the
preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced
by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be
pitied rather than rebuked...the best of Pound's writing--and it is in
the Cantos--will last as long as there is any literature.
-- Ernest Hemingway, in Carlos Baker, _Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story_
A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, if you were not,
not.
-- Gertrude Stein, in Malcolm Cowley _Exile's Return_
The United States, for all that it lay over the ocean, presented a
broad target, and he fired away. His preoccupation with it, which
never left him, was that of a lover who abuses his mistress through
the mails and then wonders why she doesn't love him.
-- Charles Norman, _Ezra Pound_
But the world will know him mainly as that rare thing, a poet. And
when the broadcasts and the manias, the economics and the sense of
justice are but footnotes in some learned history, men will remember
him because he was one of the few to whom is granted the gift of
giving words to that which is beyond words.
-- Noel Stock, _The Life of Ezra Pound_
--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
-- The Jam
Jay Robert
[....]
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any
rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part
of its contents.
---Ezra Pound
He was humane but not human.
---e. e. cummings
- -
mostpeople fear most:
a mystery for which i've
no word except alive
-that is,completely alert
and miraculously whole;
with not merely a mind and a heart
but unquestionably a soul-....
---e. e. cummings
--Jay
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To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.
---William Shakespear
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Joe Fineman
> I see they call me Mussolini's boy. I only saw the bastard once.
> No German or Italian was ever in position to give me an order. So I
> took none. But a German near my home at Rapallo told me they were
> paying good money for broadcasts. That was a fatal mistake.
> -- Pound, referring to the start of his Italian broadcasts, in
> Charles Norman, _Ezra Pound_
Pound was an ardent follower of Mussolini as far back as the
nineteen-twenties, and never concealed it. He was a contributor to
[the British fascist] Mosley's review, the _British Union Quarterly_,
and accepted a professorship from the Rome Government before the war
started. I should say that his enthusiasm was essentially for the
Italian form of Fascism..., his real underlying motive being hatred of
Britain, America and "the Jews". His broadcasts were disgusting. I
remember at least one in which he approved the massacre of the East
European Jews and "warned" the American Jews that their turn was
coming presently. These broadcasts -- I did not hear them, but only
read them in the BBC monitoring report -- did not give me the
impression of being the work of a lunatic. Incidentally I am told
that in delivering them Pound used to put on a pronounced American
accent which he did not normally have, no doubt with the idea
of...playing on anti-British sentiment.
None of this is a reason against giving Pound the Bollingen
Prize.... He _may_ be a good writer (I must admit that I personally
have always regarded him as an entirely spurious writer), but the
opinions that he has tried to disseminate by means of his works are
evil ones.... -- George Orwell, _Partisan Review_, May 1949
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
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