Shit, if I have to list all of the poems I admire that were written by fascists or fascist sympathizers we'd be here all day and I'd have a permaban for reactionary upvotes. Pound's politics were unequivocally reprehensible, and Yeats and Eliot were godawful in that department, too.
There's a good case to be made that Pound's fascism infected his poetry even if you excise the transparently ugly bits (see Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons if you're interested, or the Pound chapter in Bob Perelman's The Trouble With Genius). It's not a coincidence that he did most of his best work before he was 35, around the time World War I and its aftermath had fully broken his brain. The word "usury" shows up for the first time in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," from 1920, and in many ways it was downhill from there . . .
Pound's got no one to blame but himself if his very name is nauseating to most people. But he wrote many, many beautiful things, and his influence on literature, both as a result of his own writings and of those whom he promoted, is absolutely massive.
"What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee . . . what thou lovest well is thy true heritage." Maybe not the best thing to quote in a problematic likes thread. Nevertheless !
P.S. - If you're looking for a great, innovative Marxist poet, check out Louis Zukofsky, himself a friend and protege of Pound's, to whom Pound dedicated Guide to Kulchur. Pound liked to use Zukofsky as an example of "my Jewish friend" to prove that his anti-Semitism wasn't all that bad, but Zukofsky's letters to Pound are full of entreaties for him to shut the fuck up. Anyway, Zukofsky has a whole section of his magnum opus, "A", that's in the form of a Guido Cavalcanti canzone, but uses only words and phrases found in (iirc) Chapter 10 of Das Kapital. It's pretty fucking cool.
Shit, if I have to list all of the poems I admire that were written by fascists or fascist sympathizers we'd be here all day and I'd have a permaban for reactionary upvotes. Pound's politics were unequivocally reprehensible, and Yeats and Eliot were godawful in that department, too.
There's a good case to be made that Pound's fascism infected his poetry even if you excise the transparently ugly bits (see Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons if you're interested, or the Pound chapter in Bob Perelman's The Trouble With Genius). It's not a coincidence that he did most of his best work before he was 35, around the time World War I and its aftermath had fully broken his brain. The word "usury" shows up for the first time in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," from 1920, and in many ways it was downhill from there . . .
Pound's got no one to blame but himself if his very name is nauseating to most people. But he wrote many, many beautiful things, and his influence on literature, both as a result of his own writings and of those whom he promoted, is absolutely massive.
"What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee . . . what thou lovest well is thy true heritage." Maybe not the best thing to quote in a problematic likes thread. Nevertheless !
P.S. - If you're looking for a great, innovative Marxist poet, check out Louis Zukofsky, himself a friend and protege of Pound's, to whom Pound dedicated Guide to Kulchur. Pound liked to use Zukofsky as an example of "my Jewish friend" to prove that his anti-Semitism wasn't all that bad, but Zukofsky's letters to Pound are full of entreaties for him to shut the fuck up. Anyway, Zukofsky has a whole section of his magnum opus, "A", that's in the form of a Guido Cavalcanti canzone, but uses only words and phrases found in (iirc) Chapter 10 of Das Kapital. It's pretty fucking cool.
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