I've been chewing on Ezra Pound off and on for maybe ten years now. I'm as intrigued by his genius as I am repelled by his conspicuous failings. Specifically, his severe failings of character loom larger and larger the more I study him, and I find the Cantos to be fundamentally misconceived. Rather than exploding into true cosmopolitanism, his eclectic fascination with languages and translations led him into an extreme form of idiosyncratic solipsism.

As far as I can see, the reader of the Cantos has only four options:

1) Reproduce Pound's piecemeal, eclectic philology,
2) rely heavily on commentarial literature,
3) enjoy the poems without comprehending them, or
4) let them be.

I'm gradually settling on 4, with an increasing sense of resentfulness that he made so many absurd demands on his reader. It's not clear to me that the Cantos are more profound than Paterson, for all their obscurity. It seems to me that Pound somewhere forgot that the primary function of language is to communicate.

I had a fresh shock recently reading through Pound's letters and realizing what a savage bully he was. Kenner's otherwise-excellent "The Pound Era" gives little sense of the degree to which he routinely bullied, insulted, and cajoled friend and enemy alike, or his colossally disagreeable egotism.

Having said all this, I wouldn't trade Exultations or Lustra for anything. In a more human frame of mind he wrote:


Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova,
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.