Sunday Musings

For the last week or two I've been reading a big book on science by the late Isaac Asimov. Remarkably clear and entertaining writer but even he can't make the myriad of sub-atomic particles too interesting. So I set that book aside temporarily to read one I just got from Amazon:

 Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) is a fascinating figure. I discovered him sometime in my late teens when I was still devouring libraries wholesale. I used to own three or four paperbacks of his poetry, translations and essays. He was an antiquarian, deeply interested in the troubadours, Dante and a host of other elder literature. He was hugely influential on generations of poets:

Much of Pound's legacy lies in his advancement of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century, particularly between 1910 and 1925. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, H.D., Aldington, and Aiken, he befriended and helped Cummings, Bunting, Ford, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.

My only personal connection with Pound was meeting and having numerous conversations with Basil Bunting when he was a visiting scholar at the University of Victoria in 1971. I was strongly attracted to Pound's love of world literature as well as his passionate, romantic modernism (reading his early poetry with its antiquarian language you would hardly place him in the 20th century). As well as being a brilliant poet and translator he was also an economic nut case and a repugnant anti-semite. At the end of WWII he was charged with treason and ended up spending many years in a mental hospital as being unfit to stand trial. A host of leading literary figures lobbied for his release including T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings and Ernest Hemingway. I ran across a collection of his fascistic speeches given during the war on Italian radio and was delighted and amused to see two blurbs on the back. One, from T. S. Eliot, stated that Pound was the most influential poet of the 20th century, which is likely true. The other quote, from Robert Graves, commented that, after his behavior during the war, he should have been hung. Pound seems to have known nearly every writer of the day. T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") introduced him to Robert Graves when they were at Oxford after the First World War. "Graves, this is Pound, you won't like one another."

I ran across this phrase this week: "Tradition is the enemy of Progress." Well, yes, of course, that is its primary function. You know what you are getting with tradition, while progress is always a bit of a crapshoot. The word "progress" makes a promise that events often betray.

For an envoi, let's listen to "De tous biens plaine" by Hayne van Guizeghem.