The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Pillorying “the father of twentieth century English language poetry” has long been a major industry. But Alfred Kazin’s article on Pound (NYR, March 13) reaches, in its low moments, some heights of virulence.

I can set Mr. Kazin straight on one point because I was there and wrote about it first. He declares: “In St. Elizabeth’s, talking to Allen Ginsberg and invoking his old friendship with Louis Zukovsky, Pound charmed his audience with the disclosure that his anti-Semitism was ‘a suburban prejudice.”’ In fact, Pound did not meet Allen Ginsberg in St. Elizabeth’s, nor did he express any such ideas while there.

It was only a number of years after his release from the insane asylum—on October 28, 1967, in the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice—that Pound said to me, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Russell “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” I published an account of this conversation in The Evergreen Review the following year, later in the paper-back edition of my book Ezra Pound, a Close-Up. The audience was not a bit “charmed,” as Kazin sarcastically writes—I wasn’t, anyhow. I myself felt shocked—the light of the truth, as Pound had finally recognized it, being dazzlingly sudden.

Kazin more than strongly suggests that Pound was to blame for the 7,740 Italian Jews who died at Auschwitz. Were, then, such Communist poets as Eluard, Aragon, Brecht, and Neruda to be blamed for the crimes of Stalin? And could Kazin himself be blamed for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden?

With gratuitous malice, Kazin states that in The Cantos, Pound merely “pretends to sympathy” for persecuted Jews. Well, whatever Pound’s faults—fanaticism, arrogance, racial intolerance—pretence was not one of them. And, unlike the other above-mentioned poets, Pound came to recognize and regret his political errors—as in the conversation I reported in The Evergreen Review.

Moreover, Pound suffered for his political views as did none of these writers—first the three weeks in the US Army “gorilla cage” in Pisa (a sixty-year-old poet kept in an open cage with little shelter from sun and rain!), then thirteen year’s confinement in the hellhole of Saint Elizabeth’s. I often visited the poet there and can testify to the place’s horrors. When arrested by the US Army in 1945, Pound said “If a man isn’t ready to take some risks for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.” If for nothing else, Ezra Pound’s politics should be remembered for this kind of courage.

Michael Reck

Salzburg, Austria

To the Editors:

I had not thought to reply to Oliver Taplin’s “Homer Comes Home” [March 13, 1986]. It seemed rather late in the day, not to say millennium, to be urging Homer’s greatness But reading Alfred Kazin’s essay on Pound after Taplin, struck by the coincidence of attitudes in both pieces, one through impressive omission, the other through emphatic commission. I felt I must respond. Taplin is at pains to establish the fact that “A new surge of interest in the poems of Homer…has gathered pace during the last dozen years or so”—that is, among scholars. According to him, in midcentury only “outsiders,” John Cowper Powys, Simone Weil and Erich Auerbach, championed Homer. But, especially since this list is fairly miscellaneous, I am amazed that Taplin never mentions those literary lights who believed Homer the poet par excellence, said so in their criticism, illustrated it in their art: Yeats, Pound, and Joyce. Or does Taplin estimate them outsiders so much they never had any impact on anyone anywhere in the inside?

Not till 1973, Taplin tells us, did “one voice” stand out, that of Adam Parry. He recognized that, however crucial his father, Milman Parry, may have been in changing “the understanding of Homer irrevocably” by establishing the “Tradition” of oral poetry which composed the poem, in almost eliminating the individual poet (see deconstruction!), Milman was wrong and produced results “sterile and over-technical…discouraging poetic criticism.” The new scholars, following Adam Parry, now see that “Homer is reacting against his tradition instead of being its conservative product, that he derived his distinctive quality from having inherited and challenged the accumulated wealth of his bardic predecessors.” However, what this challenge came to apparently was not so much poetic after all but that Homer “tells of Greek defeats and lavishes attention and compassion on the Trojans.”

At last Taplin admits another possibly significant influence, the verse translations of Lattimore and Fitzgerald. Both, it happens, were poets attuned to modernism. Is Taplin unaware how important Pound was especially to Fitzgerald who considered Pound a chief model and mentor? Surely Yeats, Pound, and Joyce did more to improve Homer’s present status than any one else?

Kazin’s title impressed me at once. After all these years Pound still inspires “fascination and terror,” testimony to his persistent liveliness. But the first sentence suggests Kazin’s intention. “In the museum of modern literature no figure commands more space than Ezra Pound.” Whatever their fascination, Pound and modernism are overdue for relegating to the dead past. Given two such articles in one issue, one might be forgiven for wondering whether, beyond coincidence, the attitude of the Review is not reflected here—to wit, that Pound and modernism be ignored or, if dealt with, done so negatively, and that poetry itself be considered peripheral, inconsequential as it is in a modern industrial society.

To prove how much space Pound commands and to establish his own credentials, Kazin refers to the volumes of Pound on his shelves. Next Kazin, remarking the vast industry of Pound studies, names some. One misses works by Davie, Rosenthal, Bernstein, Bush, and others. And as far as modernism is concerned, I would recommend Jeffrey M. Perl’s recent judicious The Tradition of Return. These might have helped Kazin to a deeper understanding of the Cantos and of modernism as well. If he has read these books his imperviousness to their insights is particularly impressive.

Like other adverse critics of Pound not altogether unavailable to poetry, Kazin acknowledges Pound’s great lyric gifts and quotes some lyrical passages. He tells us that Pound’s lyrical power—Kazin seems satisfied with descriptions of it like “silky lines” and “lacy lines”—resides chiefly in his “associations”: “he always took his associations with him; that was his genius. He was a natural taker-over.” Then, lest we think this unmixed praise, “when his mind didn’t, his will did.” For he was a literary imperialist, “A genius not least in his American gift for appropriating land not his own, gods distinctly not in the Protestant tradition, a language so far out of time that his very need to impersonate it is as impressive as his ability to do so.” Pound was very American, but not entirely—or maybe not sufficiently—so. He should, I take it, have been content to appropriate America and England, not also Greece, Italy, and China. Is it provincialism Kazin is advocating for poets? And was there something wrong or merely unmannerly (unAmerican) in Pound’s forsaking the Protestant tradition? Is there something sacred about it? Yet Kazin calls all this “genius?”

We learn that when Pound avoided obnoxious subject matter and reserved himself to lyricism, his poetry was fine. For his “real genius was to identify with poetry itself, poetry without which men once never went to war. Poetry as primal element, kin to nature as prose can never be.” This would seem to be praise indeed. But the reservation asserts itself in the allusion to war. Or Pound as a bloody sort, a theme which is central to Kazin’s argument. He never remarks Pound’s profound hatred of war, his powerful attacks on it in Mauberley, the Cantos and elsewhere. And if it would seem attractive of poetry to be kin to nature as prose can never be, we must remember that these are prose times remote from nature.

Kazin acknowledges that no one of Pound’s generation “caught as rapturously as Pound did, from within, poetry’s genius for summing up the beginning of things, the archaic as inception, the childhood of the race, the ability to look at the world as Homer did, for the wonder of creation.” However, lest we take this ability too seriously, Kazin assures us that it was not a direct look after all but mainly out of Pound’s classical reading. Or indeed looking at the world through Homer’s eyes. So even Pound’s lyricism is questionable? Kazin does not seem to realize that Homer was the culmination of who knows how many poets. Yet Kazin admits that “Pound did something amazing: he turned himself into a mythical creature…. The bard, the ‘singer of tales.”’ We might consider this a noble recovery of poetry’s great role, but aside from its being archaic (what has a bard from ancient times to do with us now?), Kazin maintains that it was “his genius for sound” that convinced Pound he was such a bard. With him sound over-whelmed sense.

Even as Pound had “an understandable affinity with was as his element,” he “was unable to understand a society that had lost all contact with poetry as its great tradition.” That loss was, I would say, exactly what Pound did understand and fought heroically against. Furthermore, Kazin fails to notice Pound’s success: his influence at least on poets and critics. Even Auden, who little resembled Pound, could say, “There are very few living poets, even if they are not conscious of having been influenced by Pound, who could say, ‘My work would be exactly the same if Mr. Pound never lived.”’ Nor does Kazin notice Pound’s making as much as anyone the vast enterprise of poetry possible today. Now even in the USA, whatever the indifference of the general populace and most of our intellectuals to poetry, one can admit to being a poet without flinching! But here we are at the heart of what concerns me: the relevancy of poetry to our time. Is it, like nature itself, exclusively for a distant age? Does Kazin applaud the inevitability of our society’s loss of contact with poetry? Since much of our society is not close to nature why should its language be?

Kazin does admit Pound’s impact. But it was suspect, if not pinchbeck. For Pound spellbound “acolytes” (no one, in short, worth taking seriously) by his “feats of association,” which “replaced contemporary realities with a web of learning.” At least Pound did have something beyond mere “sound?” Kazin recognizes “There was an extraordinary energy, a driving impulse; poetry was assuming powers lost in the nineteenth century to the great novelists.” For a moment he seems to appreciate what Pound was trying to do and to a considerable degree succeeding in doing. But, no, his Browning-learned style with his “zeal for violent types from Malatesta to Mussolini…reflected Pound’s harkening back to martial associations with poetry.” Might not Pound’s zeal be traced back not so much to the violence of these types but to his respect for them, however mistaken, as vigorous actors who used part of that vigor for the cultivation of the intellect and the arts and for the erection of great monuments?