The tone and title of Michael Lind’s “Poetical Correctness” in the July Prospect give the impression that he is attacking an entrenched orthodoxy. There is nothing daring, however, about criticising Ezra Pound-no major poet of the last century is less fashionable. Pound’s place in our culture is a little like Sigmund Freud’s: Pound also suffers from being simultaneously over-familiar and unknown. Nine tenths of the advice offered at creative writing workshops is taken third-hand from Pound’s ABC of Reading; too few people, however, read Pound himself.
Many of Lind’s criticisms of Pound are justified. Pound’s work is often incomprehensible, and much is viciously fascist and anti-Semitic. I can’t help wondering, however, whether Lind has actually read Pound. Does he not realise that Pound also wrote poetry of remarkable clarity and simplicity? Like this famous early lyric:
And the days are not full enough
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