[lbo-talk] RE: Milton and Pound

[joanna bujes]

Your liking for Milton is one of the items on my "list of things I can't 
understand." He is waaaay to latinate for me. I had to take a Milton 
class as an English major. I admired the spirit of Aeropagitica but I 
crawled through his syntax, and I crawled, bloody inch by bloody inch, 
through Paradise Lost.

There's a lot of fine stuff in Pound but too much whining and wailing 
over Art. He never seems to mourn the death of a human as much as the 
death of an Artist. And it's always a capital "A." But i never forget:

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

In fact, now that I think about it, one thing these two poets share is a 
quaint antiquarianism. Milton reaches back to Virgil; Pound reaches back 
to the cinquecento...and both deliberately, visibly so.

Joanna