Revalued Pound
Sir: Mr Douglas Dunn's honest and sympathetic concern for the revaluation of Pound is not helped by his falling for the usual redherrings — or anti-red herrings. What is to be revalued is the work, not the man. He never was a " traitor " (to say so is to invite legal action as he was never tried). His "personality, his arrogance" etc are not literary problems. He never broadcast on behalf of Mussolini but for his own views. Far from being anti-black a negro is immortalised in the Cantos as the one friend he had when locked up in Pisa. It is possible to be antisemitic (hard to say after Hitler but necessary) and a good poet. Milton was a hypocrite; Villon a pimp, whoremonger, murderer, thief etc — and an angelic poet; -Shakespeare anti-semitic, antiusura too, among other things. Let us accept that poets too, being human, are in some ways shits — and get it out of the way. Also, psychiatric shorthand terms like paranoia should be forbidden use by term-debasing laymen; if not also by psychiatrists as simple evasion of real problems for labels. The point is the work, not the man: except for those not interested in literature but in " personalities." And slangy terms like wops, chinks, wogs etc don't argue racialist dogmas.
In saying this I have in mind particularly Mr Dunn's relevant comments re Mr Cookson's Ezra Pound's Selected Prose. In it are no extracts from books. and " Jefferson and / or Mussolini" is easily available elsewhere (Liveright, NY, e.g.). Ditto Vorticism. Mr Dunn attacks Mr Cookson's Introduction, but his review seems much influenced by it. The ostriches are those who hide their heads in " personalities."
Tom Scott 3 Duddingston Park, Edinburgh
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