Sir: I take some of the points made by James
Blish and Mark Braham about Ezra Pound. I deliberately overstated the case: they may swing a little too much in the other direction. I doubt whether Hardy had all that much to do with Pound's content: certainly not its nature. And I for one thank God he moved on to didactic and polemical writing. Milton of course really was a fervent Cromwellian and was lucky to escape with his neck in that time: Pound fared Worse, centuries later, for very much less. If Milton had been killed we would be without Paradise Lost — a greater work than Pound ever had in him, though he is the best of this age. Insotar as the ideas come into the work of course they are relevant: this comes out in the books of Miss Brooke-Rose, Professor Kenner, and other commentators. What I object to is the implied negative syllogism used by philistine critics (not Mr Dunn, who is a sympathetic one): No great poet can be X (fascist, anti-semite, Red, whatever): Pound is X: therefore Pound is no great poet. But Mr Blish and I clearly are in basic agreement.
Mr Braham's logic is irrefutable given his premise — but it's not quite mine. I said Pound had immortalised a Negro, as his best friend in Pisa, in the Cantos: a doctrinaire anti-black would have either played down or ignored the debt. I agree about slangy racial terms and eschew them myself for Mr Braham's reasons: but vulgar as they are they are not necessarily, rarely are, racialist in the strict sense.
Tom Scott 3 Duddingston Park, Edinburgh
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