Pound and Stevens

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Fri Mar 1 16:04:54 PST 2002


At 05:36 PM 03/01/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>But I want to ask , and I am not being snotty, what are the standards that
>make Pound's or Stevens' poetry good ? I know that's a whopper, but
>whoppers are allowed here, right ? Let me not ask this totally naively.

I've always found Stevens pretty boring/pedestrian. Someone else will have to tell you why he's good.

Pound is a more interesting case. Following is from the Cantos (memorized in twenty years ago and haven't forgotten it yet.) :

"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross. What thou lovest well cannot be reft from thee. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage. Pull down thy vanity, I say, pull down...."

You see -- a kind of muscular but antiquarian modernism. He had a fine ear for poetry and, was, on the whole, a good influence on the poets of his generation.

For a really fascinating discussion of his use of poetry as a critique of history, look up Michael Harper's essay on Pound's Malatesta Cantos, published in the MLA journal (I think) in the late seventies.

Or, hell, go ahead and read some of his stuff.

Joanna B.



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