Dear Editor,

Ezra Pound’s explosive literary criticism, confident experimentation, and prophetic vision for poetry all won him fame in life, and earn him sustained historical attention now. His contemporaries recognized him as a “professor manqu�,” spouting theoretical promises of aesthetic revolution to which one must pay attention even as their realization on the ground seemed thin, rather watery. Young poets and critics ever since have sensed the legitimate beauty in some of his pronouncements and in some of his lines, and have been initially seduced by the dogmatic power with which he aphoristically expressed some of them. Nonetheless, Pound’s relative vacuity, as James rightly details [“The Arrow Has Not Two Points,” December 2007], must eventually lead to disappointment. The poet and critic was simply not as good as he pretended to be.�

But here begins the unique Poundian problem. Even as one discovers that the Cantos are not very good poetry, and even as one suspects that the ideas ensnared within them are potted and cracked, one remains intrigued enough to hope that a little exegesis, a little scholarship, might make the whole thing cohere. The literary reputation of the Cantos remains a consensus endlessly deferred, because critics understandably have difficulty finally setting it all aside and saying, “Enough.” Pound will find fewer and fewer sincere readers over time. The many lessons he taught to young writers will either be ignored as “period style” or learned elsewhere from more consistent poets. This will, in turn, slowly lessen the quantity of Pound scholarship.�

But only slowly. Even those of us who wonder, “Was it all worthwhile?” — the hours toiling through the Cantos and commentary — will remain intrigued by the bold feats of pedantry that constitute scholarship on the poem. I agree with everything  James wrote in his essay; I have read with effort and interest, and thrown aside with contempt, the Cantos. But even the name “Pound” still captures my imagination; with many others, I perpetuate his centrality to modern poetry despite knowing full well it is mostly an empty center.

James Matthew Wilson
Greenville, North Carolina



Dear Editor,

To add to Clive James’s account of the influence of Ezra Pound among students in Sydney in the fifties, I can report that Pound was still prominent in the west of  Ireland two decades later. In Limerick, where I grew up, the link with Pound was partly circumstantial: our main local poet, Desmond O’Grady, had worked with Pound during the latter’s last years in Italy and therefore acted as a kind of broker for Pound’s presence. O’Grady regularly returned to Limerick from his home in the Mediterranean to read installments from his own Poundian projects. A picture of Pound still hangs in Limerick’s principal literary haunt, a pub known as the White House.�

Pound had a multi-layered appeal to our small but intense literary coterie. His work was iconoclastic, unacademic, eclectic, and seductively obscure. We did not mind Pound’s political and personal failure because there was plenty of that around in our milieu — it made him an even better match for our marginal condition. He had mapped out a special cultural geography centered on the Mediterranean but reaching to the Far East as well. The Cantos in particular invited a very special license: poetry could be about anything from literary gossip to economics. It seemed that you could pile any material into poetry in the expectation that it would come out the other end marked “oeuvre.” We went along with this because the ramblings were seasoned with the occasional flash of  insight, allowing us a glimpse of  Pound’s southern European world.�

With the wisdom of  distance, now that our early excitements have passed, it is natural to reassess Pound and to see the limitations of the Cantos. I imagine that the translations and versions, especially the Cathay poems, will stand the test of time better than his sprawling life project. But looking back at the Cantos, many of us, like Clive James, are reviewing our own youth as writers, when Pound’s mood music provided an endless set of suggestions and possibilities. That is something I believe we should always acknowledge.

Sean Lysaght
Fahy, Ireland



Dear Editor,�

I was moved almost to tears by David Biespiel’s infectiously enthusiastic review of  James Laughlin’s The Way It Wasn’t [“Former Dogs,” November 2007]. I would have run out and picked up a copy of the book if I hadn’t had it in hand already. This posthumous “auto-bug-offery,” as Laughlin called it, is an odd book in its choppy but beautifully designed abecedarian layout, in which almost no entry completely satisfies the reader, who now teased wants more. But fortunately there is much more by and on Laughlin out there, including the smartly edited collections of  his letters to and from Williams, Merton, Schwartz, Pound, and Rexroth.�

Thank you for allowing Biespiel the space to roam around a bit in his essay, and thank you Ezra Pound for saying to Laughlin: 
“Jas, you’re never going to be any good as a poet....    You’d better 
become a publisher. You’ve got enough brains for that.” Where would poetry be now without Pound’s directness, the publications of New Directions, and the great intelligence of  James Laughlin?

Jim Carmin
Portland, Oregon



Dear Editor,

I was delighted to see Poetry devote so much space not only to Heather McHugh’s essay on Vesalius, but also to several generously sized reproductions of the anatomist’s work [“The Fabric: A Poet’s Vesalius,” December 2007]. But after I started reading McHugh’s riff, my initial enthusiasm began peeling away like the guts and muscles from one of those Renaissance cadavers. �

It is very difficult to make headway through the piece since so much of the time McHugh spins her wheels trying to be funny or clever. At least half the essay consists of bad puns: “whose flesh is calving from their lower legs” and “meanwhile the shovel’s head (what bites the dust) is peculiar.” It’s just one rimshot after another. Even McHugh’s naughty bits don’t work: to be told that “for all his bones” a skeleton can’t “ever again have a boner” was, by the time I got to it, exactly what I was afraid she was going to say. �

When not straining for the comical, McHugh was occasionally 
able to be clear, meaningful, and even witty. For instance, that “Lothario’s moustache” observation she made about the dissected head was wonderful. But most of the time the good stuff is lost in a blur of imprecise language; as McHugh herself states in the piece, “the semantics are antic; the syntax attacked.” Indeed. After cutting my way through the blubber of puns, half-puns, relentless alliteration, and heedless grammatical complexity, I found that basic sense had often been flensed right off the bone, leaving a skeleton of meaning 
as misshapen and defective as the Elephant Man’s.�

Wonderful illustrations, however.

Michael Hudson
Fort Wayne, Indiana



Dear Editor,

The Italian Poetry Portfolio [December 2007] touched on a controversial issue that keeps raising its head in current discourse — one that I think has created more confusion than light among critics and poets who fail to see, or choose to ignore, its complexity. I am referring 
to the widespread dispute over what Gianluigi Simonetti calls “the lyric subject,” involving what some perceive to be the overuse, in poems today, of the pronoun “I,” or at least the dominance of the first-person consciousness or point of view in lyric poetry.�

Too much of anything can erode our taste for it, and the dominant genre of any period is likely to produce the greatest number of  inferior works. But observations of  that kind do not justify condemning on aesthetic grounds either the genre or any of its characteristic features. What should be judged, rather, is the handling of those elements, and the achieved effects. The fact that using certain traditional features now requires more sensitivity and originality has not prevented great numbers of talented poets from rising to the challenge. Furthermore, the success of those who respond to the same challenge differently — 
by deliberately playing off the usual expectations — proves that inspired poems produced from either approach can achieve otherwise unattainable effects.�

Once again, we seem to be allowing the practical need for imposing definitions and creating categories to interfere with our aesthetic judgments. Whether one chooses to place the experimental ventures of certain poets under a new label (or no label at all), or sees them as variations within an existing tradition, their intrinsic quality remains the same. It is far more useful for critics and teachers to reveal, as Simonetti does, what the poems are actually doing.

Robert Longoni
Gilbert, Arizona



Dear Editor,�

In the December 2007 issue of your magazine you published a 
letter from  James O’Keefe who severely criticized my “Notebook” [“Dangerous Considerations,” October 2007]: “Adam Zagajewski misrepresents the career of French poet and statesman Saint-John Perse....    To lump Perse with the advocates of appeasement is a travesty.” He also accused me of a “disregard of facts and calumny of a great poet and statesman.”�

I may have been a bit too tough on Alexis L�ger (the real name of the poet Saint-John Perse), the leading French diplomat in the 
thirties; yes, he was not an “appeaser.” Still, I’m not going to agree with O’Keefe’s opinion, which glorifies the poet’s political role in the prewar period.�

I base my negative view on Saint-John Perse’s diplomatic career from a series of statements by Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, one of the foremost historians of French diplomacy in the twentieth century. In his major book, La d�cadence, 1932–1939, Duroselle says: “L�ger tried rather to defend the policy established in the twenties than to adapt French diplomacy to the new circumstances.” And later: “he had always remained a representative of an optimistic, moderate left, who didn’t dare to see clearly and to understand that Hitler would go to the very end.”

Adam Zagajewski
Krakow, Poland