/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19746875]

How difficult is it to get into this guy?
I'm looking to get the Library of America collection which afaik contains all his poetry except those in the Cantos, are these difficult to read and understand? Is his style of poetry an acquired taste to appreciate?
I don't know any language other than English but I'm trying to learn Latin atm and I remember his poetry containing quite a lot of non English text, I've also not read much classical literature besides parts of the bible and the Greeks so i'll probably miss the references

[Anonymous No.19746955]

since you seem to be already aware of high allusiveness of his poetry, the next step is to make yourself familiar with his ideogrammatic method which he gives an account of in The ABC of Reading. you can find its implementation in most of his poems, but the best place to start would probably be Cathay. technically it's a collection of translations of Chinese poetry, but Pound cared little for the literal correspondence to the original so you can also use it to get a little grip on his own work - and if you won't be able to find it enjoyable, probably no amount of theory you read will make him truly speak to you. at least that's what happens to me in similar cases.

[Anonymous No.19746967]

>>19746875
Easy to get into. Impossible to master.

[Anonymous No.19747052]

>>19746955
I remember someone posting recently about how Pound's understanding of other languages was less than rudimentary, especially in the case of Chinese.

[Anonymous No.19747081]

This is a good overview of how to get into Pound that is frank about how esoteric and difficult it is.
https://counter-currents.com/2019/10/remembering-ezra-pound-9/

>>19747052
There are some funny things floating around about that and I wouldn't overly doubt it but I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, especially since Pound was such a popular figure to hate in polite, i.e. Bloomsbury/Cambridge Apostles type British society. The kind of upper bourgeois types who would feel smug and vindicated when Pound was psychologically tortured after WW2 for daring to live by his convictions.

[Anonymous No.19747102]

>>19747081
I don't really think that's likely. I don't think an entire art society would detract his work in that specific way, especially since Pound was so beloved in his time, heralded as the greatest poet to ever live by artists and critics alike. Plus, he apparently renounced many of those beliefs in his later, so clearly his convictions weren't very strong, and one wonders if they were even worth fighting for.

[Anonymous No.19747134]

>>19747052
well, that's the point. the whole sentiment of modernist translation (including non-English modernism) was centred around recreating the intuitive feelings you get from reading the original rather than its complete authenticity.

[Anonymous No.19747276]

>>19747102
>so clearly his convictions weren't very strong

Strong enough for over 20 years of support, including re-patriating to the fascist states to support a global fascist war on usury:
>Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury".[3] He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers and mongers, and Jews, among others, as causes, abettors and prolongers of the world war,

>he apparently renounced many of those beliefs
They tortured him as part of their weird psychological humiliation fetish after WW2. They did it to many others too.
>He spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

But he never repudiated:
>While in St. Elizabeths, Pound would often decline to talk to psychiatrists with names he deemed Jewish (he called psychiatrists "kikiatrists"),[369] and he apparently told Charles Olson: "I was a Zionist in Italy, but now I'm for pogroms, after what I've experienced in here (SLiz)."[370] He advised visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he referred to any visitor he happened not to like as Jewish.[371]
>Pound struck up a friendship with Eustace Mullins, apparently associated with the Aryan League of America and author of the 1961 biography This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound.[373] Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member who, after Brown v. Board of Education (a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating racial desegregation in public schools), set up a Citizens' Council chapter, the Seaboard White Citizens' Council in Washington.[374] Members had to be white, supportive of racial segregation, and believers in the divinity of Jesus.[375] Kasper wrote to Pound after admiring him at university, and the two became friends.[376] In 1953 Kasper opened a far-right bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village,[377] that displayed Pound's work in the window.
>It became increasingly clear that Pound was schooling Kasper in the latter's pro-segregation activism.
>[After his release,] Pound and Dorothy arrived in Naples on the SS Cristoforo Colombo on 9 July 1958, where Pound was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press.

They knew they could never break his will, so they did everything they could to break his mind instead.

[Anonymous No.19747381]

>>19747276
The belief that Pound renounced his views apparently comes from Allen Gingsberg, who went to visit him in Pound's old age and, so he recounts, confessed that he repented about all his anti-Semitism, basically in his deathbed. That's the only testimony we have of Pound renouncing his bigoted views, and supposedly they have credibility because it comes from a fellow poet and a Jew himself, Gingsberg. Of course, one could say that Gingsberg was only trying to save the memory of a poet he admired very much for posterity, and so he invented this melodramatic story of Pound's repenting about his life. Whether that story is true or false matters very little. Pound may have been a man with despicable views, but he was a great friend of literature and a daring poet (if he was one of the greats or not, I leave that to individual taste).