Stray thoughts on Ezra Pound, in relation to the controversy at Tony Tost's blog:

EP assumed the mantle of the traditional poet, in all its intensity & vatic pomp. Anyone who has heard recordings of his chanting the Cantos will recognize some of the effects. The intensity, the dramatic presence, he instilled into his experimental epic, comes through, even as it works in counterpoint across the free-slapdash, quotational-notational, archival-dustbinnishness & slanginess.

As such & so he was assuming a mask, the mask of the ancient epic vates; a very unusual & curious endeavor. I think he did this under the influence, & in the partial shadow, of Yeats, and somewhat in conscious contrast to Eliot, whose Anglified urbanity presented another version of "tradition".

What I find interesting is just the wildness of the project itself, the way this something of a swamp Yankee upstart sloughed off his own Americanness to become a sort of eccentric-yet-representative "figure" for the West at a certain and particular historical crossroads; and the way the contradictions involved in assuming such a pose are reflected in the grain of the poem's (the Cantos') style and "plot", the excruciating way it tries to meld archaic Europe with US political developments, in an overall world-epic of consciousness.

Pound thus presents himself as an inescapable, pivotal literary-historical phenomenon. But what remains valuable is not so much the substance of his own world-view, or his pronouncements, but the example of engagement he offers. Not the engagement with politics (which revealed both his shrunken capacity for empathetic humanity, and his misguided authoritarianism) but the stance he took, his attitude toward poetry as a living tradition, as something of continuing relevance and importance to the world at large. He wasn't satisfied with his own dialect, his own experience, his own land, his own local business: for him poetry engaged the whole world and the whole past and future; Dante & Homer & Spenser et al. were still living literary forces, spirits he encountered. Olson was right to argue that Pound was so tied to tradition and the past that it distorted his understanding of contemporary reality; but the weakness of Olson's technique, in comparison to Pound's, shows how much was lost by shrugging off Pound's vatic mantle.