Ezra Pound and Lord Castlereagh: no respect

Not much blogging today. I finished two paid projects, and that seems to have used up all spare energy for this evening. I'm currently keeping the eyelids open with matchsticks, and I'm certainly not up to arguing about Heidegger right now. Particularly not with John Halasz, whose comment on yesterday's Heidegger post I do appreciate. Tomorrow!

But mentioning fascist poet Ezra Pound, as I did in the post about Unacknowledged Legislators, reminded me of a picnic with my beloved a few years back on San Giorgio Maggiore, one of the Venetian islands. Which involved some wine, and after a while I had to wander off to look for a tree and privacy. And in the cemetery I stumbled across the grave of Ezra Pound, though I'd had no idea it was there. How often does that happen?

And, well, it was mainly because he was a fascist, an antisemite and generic racist, but there was also, in the back of my mind, quite a lot of his poetry, especially the Cantos. Stuff like:

This, From Canto LI:
"that hath the light of the door, as it were
a form cleaving to it.
Deo similis quodam modo
hic intellectus adeptus
Grass; nowhere out of place. Thus speaking in Königsberg
Zwischen die Volkern erzielt wird
a modus vivendi"

Or this, from Canto LXII:
"ten head 40 acres at 3 / (shillings) per acre
who lasted 6 years, brewing commenced by the first Henry
continued by Joseph Adams, his son
at decease left a malting establishment"

Or this, from Canto XLIX:
"State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?
This is infamy; this is Geryon.

KEI MEN RAN KEI
KIU MAN MAN KEI
JITSU JETSU K O KWA
TAN FUKU TAN KEI

Sunup; work
Sundown; to rest"

And on it goes. Well, FUKU too, Pound, I thought, aiming mostly for the o in Pound. Well, I might have if I'd remembered Canto XLIX.

There's fascist ranting a-plenty in the Cantos, but even when it isn't fascist ranting it's still ranting. Pound wrote some good stuff early in his career, though I think less than is generally claimed. But by the 1930s he was pumping out rant by the page: reams upon reams of it, and great drivel it was too. Whatever gift he might once have had, Pound became the spiritual father of the wibblers
who scatter words
around the page
like
this
and that means they must be
writing
poetry.

Anyway, it was for the fascism and racism, of course, but above all it was for the Cantos. You might think it's a fairly crass form of criticism, but it comes recommended by Byron. Here's his doggerel written after the burial of Lord "Murder" Castlereagh:

"Posterity will ne'er survey
A finer grave than this;
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and ----."

[The dashes are Byron's, not mine.]

Robert Conquest produced a comment on Pound that, while it couldn't possibly have been as satisfying as mine, was just a bit wittier:

Said Pound, "When writing a Canto
It becomes a sort of portmanteau
For any old crap
That occurs to a chap
Plus masses of pig-Esperanto."