Reply to a question re : Ezra Pound, Hart Crane

Susan Brown, my gentle interlocutor in this ongoing explication of Ravenna Diagram conundra, emailed to ask for more detail on what I meant (in the "Preliminaries") by my statement that in this epic poem (that is, in Ravenna Diagram) I was mounting a challenge to Pound's presentation of history (in his Cantos, his "poem including history"), with help from Hart Crane.  This was my response :

Quick reply, Susan : my sense is that Pound, despite all his Dantesque and Provencal medievalism, his knowledge of medieval scholastic theology, tends to deride and downplay the "Hebraic" dimension of Western culture-history.  There is a strong occultist dimension - the Eleusinian mysteries, Neo-platonism, etc.  Also the very marked Fascist tendencies, the Nietzschean(?) disdain for Jewish and Christian compassion.  Pound is not consistent : my "argument" with him is not very fair.  But it's there.  Pound's "poem including history", in my view, pretty much eviscerates the basic Jewish-Christian foundations of (at least) the Western dimensions of world history.

Another aspect of all this concerns Crane.  Pound (like Eliot in some ways) was a nostalgic expatriate living in Europe.  He was a political authoritarian, a reactionary.  Hart Crane, despite his Platonic-visionary leanings, was devoted to Whitman and the tradition of a mythical, futuristic America (Crane's "Atlantis"), rooted in democratic values.  This is, I know, a great simplification and idealization of Crane.  Crane has a special symbolic place in Ravenna Diagram and in my writing in general, which I won't get into now.  But the STYLE of R.D. owes at least as much to Crane as to Pound.  For I long time I sensed a kind of sonic stylistic affinity between Crane's idiom (his imagery and sound) and Mandelstam's approach to imagery, metaphor & sound.  Which (sort of) became my own approach to imagery & sound.