Dear Editor,

Ezra Pound is not above criticism; he is, however, above ill-informed and tendentious criticism. A case in point is Clive James's squib in the December issue of Poetry ["The Arrow Has Not Two Points"].

James asks us to believe that Pound erred in his famous line about Dioce, "whose terraces are the color of stars," on the grounds that stars, unless seen through a telescope, have no color. This is arrant nonsense. To take just two obvious counter-examples, the relatively nearby red giants Betelguese (Beetlejuice) and Aldebaran are most certainly, as seen by the naked eye, colored. They are red. Moreover, had James done his homework, he would have learned that Pound's line is based on Herodotus's report of a King of Media named Deioces (Herodotus's Historiae, 1, 96.2), builder of Ecbatana, whose terraces were colored after the five then-known planets: and if Mars isn't colored red on close conjunctions with Earth, I don't know what red is. So if Pound is open to criticism on this point it can only be on the basis of his having called planets "stars," whether basing this misnomer on ancient astronomy (in which the planets were called "wandering stars") or on the poet's need for a monosyllable to clinch his verse. Either is of course an altogether different matter.

James has harsh things to say about Pound's line "the ant's a centaur in his dragon world," claiming that he doesn't understand it. Well I do, like many others. A centaur as classically depicted consists of a horse (four legs) surmounted from neck on by a man's torso (two arms), counting six appendages in all. Seeing a six-appendaged ant as a miniature centaur is, then, a wholly apt—indeed brilliant—metaphor, perhaps one that John Donne would not have been ashamed of.

James says that, contrary to his ephebic expectations, the Cantos doesn't (or don't) cohere. Well, they do (or it does). Not in the usual way, granted, and probably not even in the way that Pound himself may have expected during the roughly half century of their composition. Rather, they cohere as a depiction of one man's take on things over that same half century—his experiences, thoughts, readings—enlivened by a comparative depiction of previous ones. They do not constitute an "epic" in the traditional sense, but "epic" is an elastic-enough term to serve as well as any other to cover both the Cantos and their nearest predecessors, Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. All three, did one want to be picky, could be called "autopsychographies," but if a traditional epic is the tale of one man either in tune or at odds with his times, why couldn't that man be the author for a change? True, Wordsworth's life was a lot more coherent than Pound's, and his (rather boring) long poem shows it; but few enough lives are that coherent, and so few enough records of a life could cohere to that extent without lying.

James complains that some of Pound's metaphors—or comparisons if you prefer—fall flat, and comes down hard on "in the gloom the gold/Gathers the light about it" on the grounds that gold no more does so than "Indian costume jewelry." Well, sure. A valid point, unless one recalls that a poetic comparison is meant to do more than juxtapose dissimilars, it's meant to fit the poem and suggest something further that furthers the theme. Thus, for instance, "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" (Sonnet LXXIII) is no truer to wintry boughs than "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the gross crows squawked," but Shakespeare's line fits the rest of his poem's theme a little better, doesn't it? And in any case when Pound was at his lyrical best (which wasn't always), it's hard to think of anyone in all of English literature who surpassed him: for example, "where the salt hay whispers to tide's change" (Canto CXV): specific, vivid to mind's eye and ear, new.

James—and this may be the bone he comes before us most particularly to pick—wishes to animadvert to Pound's politics and crackpot economics and their effect on his poem. Well, OK, his economic theories were unworkable, and did infect the Cantos, just as Avicenna's theory of vision infected John Donne's "The Extasie." And Pound was thoroughly wrong-headed (in fact, downright nasty) in his politics during his Mussolini period. In point of fact he might well, on either score, be labeled both paranoid and megalomaniac (two sides of the same coin, in Freudian parlance). What's worse, in his broadcasts for Fascist Italy during WWII he certainly verged on treason, though his few possibly treasonable remarks, relying as they mostly did on his auditors' putative knowledge of late-medieval Italian history and other obscurities, must in the main have been incomprehensible to those few who could tune him in, as they certainly were to those in Washington trying desperately to transcribe them (as can be seen in their raw transcripts, readily available on file at the Library of Congress). As to his having escaped hanging into the benign care of an insane asylum in Washington, surely James never visited him there. (Full disclosure: I did.) St. Elizabeths was in every sense an institutional loony bin, and Pound lived in a cell there, in something rather less than comfort, for fourteen years before his release. I wish James could in his charity imagine mealtime, Pound released for it at a time of his guardians' choosing, facing, or so I surmise, powdered eggs, "mystery meat," and faux mash, downed in the close company of his clamorous fellow inmates. Justice is fickle, especially after a war, but isn't it a little late to debate this?

Ezra Pound was a greatly gifted poet—surely, with Eliot, one of the two greatest poets in English of the last century, and of American literature of any century—who, for reasons we will probably never know, was deeply flawed. He wrote some of the finest lyrical lines that any poet has ever achieved, or ever will. He was, in addition, an infallible guide to his co-equal, T.S. Eliot, and a kind and giving guide to neophytes (myself included). A man of strange and unsavory beliefs and compulsions, who strayed far from any path one can countenance—and our only Dante so far. He deserves better than uninformed attacks.william wattirvine, californiaDear Editor,

Having re-read and written about Ezra Pound's Malatesta Cantos recently, I looked forward to reading Clive James's essay with attention and enthusiasm. I could not believe how badly the essay was argued, nor how much I could be disappointed with such a reputable magazine.

The first several pages merely play at length with personal memories. Des Mots, I thought, get the ideas going. The first quotation is not "specific," James claims, though the passage reminded me of lovely moments in Homer, another poet I've been mulling closely for quite some time, and an acknowledged influence on the Cantos, though I don't see his name in the essay.

James goes on to single out or to speak generally about passages mostly bland; I have not found such lines typical, however; I did find James typically biased and shallow in his censures. So what if Manhattan was of more interest to Whitman than to Pound? James pokes at a line of Pound for coloring the stars. "What color are stars?" he says. Some in fact are red giants, like Betelgeuse; others are distinctly blue and gold. James calls the rhythm here "non-mellifluous," supposedly "inexorable because rarely iambic." Shall we then dismiss the honeyless, non-iambic lines of Beowulf?

Subsequent paragraphs are jerky prose, insulting and increasingly unfair: can it be that Pound never created beautiful poetry in all of the Cantos? James falls back on the old contempt for Pound's fascism, discounts the poet's emotional life, and, when he concedes merit to a section, declines to explain why—or even to explicate. James tries to be insulting and funny both, and he fails at both.

But probably the worst flaw of this essay is its age. The flashy-looking attacks, for anyone familiar with Pound and his readers, go back decades—nay, generations—to the thirties and forties. Moreover, the space, time, and energy allotted to the essay imply some level of agreement by the editorial staff. Shuddering at the spectacle of more such wasted space—not to mention the loss of good poetry there—I must cancel my subscription for the foreseeable future.

Edward McCrorie
Newport, Rhode Island



Dear Editor,

The flaw in Clive James's reading of the Cantos is that his opinion of them is tainted by his overzealous reading of Pound as a schoolboy ("I could not have been more arrested if I had been caught breaking into a liquor store"), even though he attempts to quash such criticism up front. Looking back at the Cantos, James seems to hope for a follow-through of some grand design, each line pointing to a central argument or point of view. But no one reads Pound like that these days. The Cantos are well known to be deeply flawed, a mass of data, and are read exactly on those terms. It was an amazing attempt that failed. The luster and power of the Cantos for modern readers (those not as far behind the times as James) can be found in their sheer hubristic attempt to build a poem that includes history and all the oddity that goes along with it.Michael Marcinkowskichicago, illinois Dear Editor,

Clive James has been having himself on as they say in Australia. Ravings in the Cantos? Yes, and in The Prelude and in all that's been collected of Eliot. None quite so ill-bred as James on Pound. I will not take time to copy in this letter the number of James's silly remarks. Read it again.

George Gulick
Cambridge, Massachusetts



Clive James responds:

Contrary to William Watt's assumption, I have little trouble imagining that Pound's long stay in the insane asylum was no picnic. But I wasn't saying that it was. I was merely saying that he got a better break than many people who were sent to their deaths for no reason at all, and whose fate can easily be said to have been at least partly determined by Pound's professed politics, which were a lot more than "nasty." They were murderous, and meant to sound like it, right there in the Jew-baiting sections of the Cantos which the work's diehard admirers would like to think are less characteristic than the rhapsodies. Viewed from that angle, Watt's strongest point, which is based on the undoubted truth that he visited Pound in the hospital and I didn't, begins to sound less convincing. His other points sound weak straightaway. If, to the naked eye, there are red stars as well as white stars, then there are stars of more than one color, so the phrase "the color of stars" needs to be "the colors of stars," doesn't it? Pound either would have written it like that, or he would have recast it. But he did neither of those things, because "the color of stars" is meant to mean what it says, which, I now think, doesn't sound like much, although I once thought it did.

I never thought that the ant was like a centaur, because there is nothing about the ant lifting its front section so that the front two "appendages" (Watt's word, and pretty clearly a fudge) would look like a centaur's arms. Once again, if Pound had meant that, he could have said so. But he didn't. What he offered at that point, and at countless other points in the Cantos, was the chance for commentators to get in and help him with the writing. There, one suspects, lies the real secret of the lingering attraction. It wasn't I, incidentally, who said that the work doesn't "cohere." It was Pound. To everyone except him and his more abject fans, it was always obvious that he had set out to be incoherent. Watt can call this fragmentary view of experience a "take" if he wishes, but I wish he wouldn't drag Dante into it.

It almost makes more sense to drag Homer into it, as Edward McCrorie does in a letter seemingly designed to remind me that intentional attempts at humor can never be as funny as the would-be seriousness that misjudges its tone. I laughed a lot to hear that McCrorie has been "mulling" Homer "closely." Is there any other way to mull him? The sad truth is that Pound, while he will always attract interest, inspires lasting loyalty only among those whose pretended confidence is barely controlled hysteria. There is always a giveaway, such as McCrorie's threat to cancel his subscription "for the foreseeable future." It is meant to sound like a bit more than the canceling of a subscription, but somehow it comes out as meaning rather less. Anyway, let's hope he doesn't do it. This magazine, in keeping with its name, has always treated poetry as the stuff of life, and consequently there have always been quarrels. It was an element that Ezra Pound, to his lasting credit, helped to bring to the magazine in the first place. That much, at least, we can all grant him without a second thought.

Clive James



Dear Editor,

In her charming, witty, and provocative essay based on the illustrations for Vesalius's anatomical studies ["The Fabric: A Poet's Vesalius," December 2007], Heather McHugh does not give the proper name of the creator of those brilliant and disturbing images. She refers to "Calcar"; but Calcar (Kalkar) is merely a town in northwestern Germany with a rich artistic tradition. The name of the artist is actually Jan Stephan van Calcar (1499-1546). He came to Venice in 1536 and was active in Titian's workshop. He completed the illustrations for Vesalius in 1536 in Padua. In his Lives of the Painters (1550), Vasari describes Stephan as "a praiseworthy master, both in small and large figures, and marvelous in portraits. . . His were the anatomical designs engraved and published by Andrea Vesalio, with his works, and they are worthy of honor for all time." Vasari later writes of Stephan as "my great friend," who "died young at Naples, a man of great promise, leaving his anatomical studies to Vesalio." In his Lives of the Netherlandish and German Painters (1617) Carol van Mander calls Stephan an artist "whose importance in [the history of] art, in view of his achievements, I cannot proclaim loudly enough." Examples of his portraits can be found in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Obviously, I am a fan who feels a great artist has not been given his due.

Robert Kramer
Riverdale, New York



Dear Editor,

I presume this is the nth e-mail you've received pointing out that Thomas Moore, the Irish poet (Moore's Melodies), is not the same person as Thomas More who coined the term "Utopia," a mistake made on the magazine's podcast with reference to the phrase in italics in the first line of Fiona Sampson's "After the Air Tattoo": "All in the stilly night." Thomas Moore actually has "Oft in the stilly night" in his poem. Is she also referencing the first line of the Katharine Tynan Hinkson (also Irish) poem "Sheep and Lambs"—"All in the April evening"?

Anyway, it was an excellent podcast, so I bought the magazine when I saw it in Borders in Dublin. Loved the issue, great mix of material: I may even subscribe!

Michael Farry
Trim, Ireland