My tutor's theory was that the notes and learned references in The Waste Land were meant as joke.  The whole thing, IIRC, according to him (intials JC as matter of fact) was a satire on bloodless intellectuals and we meant to admire the full earthiness of Albert and Lil.  I had my doubts at the time.

I like that! And even though I don't read German I can still somehow tell that it's a very fine translation. 

At 9:30 yesterday evening, there was a programme about Ezra Pound. A friend e-mailed me to say it was on. Not the happiest of subject content, but since I knew virtually nothing beforehand, I listened to most of it. I suppose one should always separate the person from the poetry?

Pound himself certainly didn't do so - he saw Mussolini's programme as a political realisation of his own aesthetic principles.

It's a tough question, which comes up in connection with a number of twentieth-century artists and thinkers and a few from the previous century too. Pound was clearly a "bad poet", in the sense that the philistinism he saw around him led him to blame the ignorant for their ignorance rather than the social systems which keep them that way, which mistake was compounded by mindless antisemitism. So the person and the poetry can't really be separated.

On the other hand, the work of someone like Pound can be learned from as an extreme example of the fact that every artist's work contains contradictions of some sort or another, because of the contradictions inherent in their social environment and in doing artistic work in that environment. If one blinds oneself to whatever positive or profound qualities an artist's work might have, the bigoted side has won. I find most of Pound's poetry somewhat indigestible, but it ought also be possible to see (a) how the Cantos in particular stand as a kind of epic/tragic parable of the twentieth century and (b) why so many of the modernist poets who followed him (including for example Louis Zukovsky, who was himself Jewish) drew inspiration from his work. Pound's hubristic and failed attempt to encompass the entire world (as he saw it) in a vast poem has clear parallels with the dictators' dreams of domination. Nevertheless there are lines and images in it which have stuck in my mind since I first read it. Something "bad" is always mixed deeply into the beauty, even in the latest of the Cantos with their admissions of failure and recantations, like the lines below from no.115. But this is real poetry I think.

A blown husk that is finished
            but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
                  where the salt hay whispers to tide's change
Time, space,
         neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
           doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
                        where the dead walked
                         and the living were made of cardboard.

I really don't read them that way - more as a type of self-justification (obviously the fact that I know that Pound never retracted the things he said in the war years, nor apologised, probably colours my interpretation, but I still think that quality would come across without that background knowledge).

The earlier, pre-Cantos, Pound I find very problematic - tightly constructed, with a fine ear, but as one commentator (I forget which) said, incapable of expressing any emotion other than rancour. Indeed I doubt whether Pound would have accepted that as a valid basis for criticism, with all his absolutist and universalist ideals (as he elaborates upon in the ABC of Poetry). But that to me demonstrates all that's wrong with his aesthetic, more than anything else. Such untidy things as human factors are all to be ridden roughshod over in the name of his juggernaut-like aesthetic vision of the world - a dangerous ideology if ever there was one. I couldn't deny the importance of Pound's technical innovations and the influence they had over later generations. It would be one thing to try and make a case for these independently of the immense flaws in and limitations of the human being who developed and employed them, but I don't think that will wash (nor will it with Stravinsky, Orff, Respighi and numerous others). Probably the problem is with the very fetishisation of technical innovation in and of itself, regardless of its application. That aesthetic ideology, with all its dehumanising implications, perhaps represents the very worst aspects of certain manifestations of artistic modernism* (which in some ways can be the most conservative aesthetic of all, predicated as it is upon imaginary classicist ideals).

On the other hand, whilst trying to capture the whole world in a poem (or in Hymnen or most works that have the word 'World' in the title) may spring from the same mentality as the 'dictators' dream of domination', no poet, through their work alone, could wreak anything like the damage than an actual dictator can. Poems can't kill people en masse; command of armies does make this possible. The worst that artists can do (and they do it all the time, including in contemporary society) is legitimation of those in power, either by directly lending their support and explicitly linking particular political programmes with their aesthetic ideology (as Pound did), or by becoming complicit in the ways in which art serves to foster and consolidate social division (of which most artists are guilty, though to varying degrees) - but the latter is another type of legitimation of power. Most dictators, royals and the like are aware of this; that is why they present themselves to the world as part of an aestheticised spectacle, creating the impression that they are 'not like us' and as such naturally destined for power for which others are not entitled. Same is true of the aura of Glyndebourne and many other institutions. Art seems to carry out the business of exclusion much better than that of inclusion.


*To be distinguished from the concept of an avant-garde, to be found in Dada, some surrealism, the Lettrists, Situationists and the punk movement, amongst others, whose approaches are absolutely predicated upon a negation of the present without requiring some utopian alternative.

This is probably fruitless, but might I suggest you forget about it and do something more enjoyable?