4. At St. Elizabeths, Pound had many visitors. Some were literary friends & admirers (TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, H.L. Menken) but there was also a cohort of political admirers, who would go on to be the seedbed of far right, sometimes including terrorists.
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15. Unlike the New Critics, though, Kenner didn't think a poet's social vision was irrelevant. However, he did believe that it could be separated from the particular politics the poet had. In other words, Pound's condemnation of usury doesn't have to be fascist.
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16. In an important 1967 essay, later reprinted & praised by William F. Buckley, Kenner argues that the politics of Pound & the other fascist modernists could be bracketed off from their politics.pic.twitter.com/JouHntdjSI
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17. Kenner: “With Hitler, Mussolini and General O’Duffy at last out of the way, with the magnetic fields their names commanded now for all time collapsed, one can see what were the real subjects of concern [for writers like Pound]" But is fascism really "out of the way"?
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18. Kenner was a brilliant critic & Pound's best advocate, but I think the new scholarship (by Alec Marsh & others) casts doubt on a central claim. Pound's fascism was not just a matter of defeated European movement but also a still living American one.
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19. In Italy today, there is a neofascist group called CasaPound. The members call themselves ragazzi di Ezra: Ezra’s boys (not related to Vox). None of this is dead & over.
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20. If I were truly on the ball, I could've worked in Robert Anton Wilson (Pounder lover, Kenner correspondent & author of the Illumantus books).
@notjessewalker explains the relevance here:https://twitter.com/notjessewalker/status/1110370229308321792 …Show this thread -
21. If I were also on the case, I would have brought in James Jesus Angleton (Pound admirer, CIA counter-intelligence expert, the man who dropped the ball on Oswald, torturer of many Soviet defectors). https://twitter.com/TCleveland4Real/status/1110368215979474946 …
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22. Anyways, if you want to read more about the cultural politics of the Pound era, here's an essay I did on Hugh Kenner & Guy Davenport. It's one of the best things I've written:https://newrepublic.com/article/153244/hugh-kenner-guy-davenport-letters-unlikely-literary-friendship …
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McLuhan... galaxy... explote
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Initially they were, but backtracked when embraced by the establishment. They began in "little magazines".
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