@JBStillFlying , I doubt whether Pound would be taught even at the U of C these days given the shift in the zeitgeist over the last couple of decades. The egregiousness of Pound’s particular case comes as close as any could to justifying this. And there is more to that case than simply the wartime broadcasts from Fascist Italy: There are parts of the Cantos infected by this vile stuff. However, that is not the only thing to be said about Pound and his work. It is nonsense to dismiss the nuanced views of Stern, Zukofsky and Friedman as @MWolf does because they as American Jewish intellectuals “had learned to accept antisemitism as ‘the way things are’.” Does that sound like a description of Friedman? It certainly does not describe Stern, whom I knew.
Stern’s admiration of Pound’s literary methods was central to his famous course in Poetry Writing. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” was his prime instance of a well-crafted poem, which he thought all aspiring poets could learn something from by a close reading. But it wasn’t merely Pound’s craft that Stern admired. The sentiments in that poem - a devastating satirical takedown of the Victorian/Edwardian literary-political establishment and the pious overstuffed writing it spawned - was very congenial to his own satirical take on life in late 20th century America. Pound was in Stern’s conception first and foremost the savage critic of the recently concluded First World War, which he saw as not only catastrophic in its effects on civilization but as the logical product of the foolish and corrupt political and cultural establishment that created it. One particularly bitter passage culminates in a brutal line about Victoria offered more as a description of the culture she presided over than of the woman herself: “an old ■■■■■ gone in the teeth.” I have never been able to get that line out of my head when I think of the Victorians.
There is an irony here: Pound’s take-no-prisoners spirit of moral certainty is very much that of today’s intellectuals. He too saw himself as a powerless outsider (he was from a small town in Idaho). He too believed he had to amplify his voice and opinions with a megaphone in order to be heard. That attitude may have given rise to some memorable lines, but it was a bad habit even then, and it became on evil one when wedded to his later hero-worship of Mussolini, the man he believed could sweep away the prevarications and compromises of the old dishonest culture that had brought on the war.
Stern, a very conscious political liberal, could hold in his mind at the same time the enormous evil of Pound’s broadcasts and the trenchant beauty of his best work. And there were other dimensions to Pound’s personality than either these political or artistic ones: he was unfailingly generous in promoting the work of other writers and artists of all stripes, finding patrons for them, even advancing loans of his own. He essentially re-wrote “The Wasteland” for Eliot without ever claiming credit for that feat. Stern, who was very fond of gossip about writers and knew the gory details in the lives of many of them, always spoke of the essential kindliness of Pound. There is a disconnect between the bien pensant public personas of many writers and the bad conduct of their private lives. With Pound the current between goodness and evil went entirely the opposite direction. This excuses nothing but is only to say that all parts of a life are important.
While I myself believe Stern’s was a larger and more humane way to consider the life of Pound or of any person, especially a person of accomplishment, I quite understand that the intellectual world has moved on. I wouldn’t attempt to argue anyone out of convictions as strong as yours, @MWolf . I say only that something is lost when those convictions are brought to the consideration of literature. You say that Pound is a special case, but a moral lens brought to bear on the arts isn’t very good at making distinctions and drawing lines as to degrees of moral deviation. Is Pound the only great writer you would ban? How do you stand on Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, and many another compromised figure of that era? How do you stand on Brecht and Sartre, who did more than flirt with Stalinism? How about Picasso’s attitude toward women? How about Faulkner on race questions? Once the guillotine claims its first head others will surely roll. That’s the temper of our times, but our times will pass - and they aren’t the best of times.