Michael Johnson on 'The Ezra Pound Problem'

How does Ted Nugent connect to Ezra Pound? Read Michael's essay. Creative Commons photo, source. 

When A Non-Euclidian Perspective came out, I noted that it contained what I thought was the best RAW essay yet on how to deal with Ezra Pound's art and politics. More recently, I mentioned Pound while talking about Poul Anderson.

Michael Johnson references both that classic RAW essay and my Poul Anderson posting in what I think is one of his best Substack pieces, "The Ezra Pound Problem." 

Here is how Michael formulates the problem:

The Ezra Pound Problem in General: that conundrum faced by any of us when confronted by a favorite artist’s bad behavior, whatever it was. We make ongoing negotiations with this.

The Ezra Pound Problem in Particular: What any of us who like Ezra Pound’s work does with his ugliness. I’m mostly interested in what other poets and writers have thought about this, and some critics who seem compellingly informed.

Rather than trying to summarize what else Michael writes, I'll just suggest that everyone read it. 

In one of his footnotes  (Michael puts good stuff in the foornotes, you have to read them too, maybe his little homage to The Widow's Son?), Michael writes, " RAW had, by 1968, been reading Pound closely for 20 years. Anderson’s mistakes didn’t stand a chance with him. Are we all like this?"

Yes, I think so. I suspect that Wilson fell in love with Pound's poetry before he learned much about Pound's politics. I know I felt really blown away by Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, a hard science fiction novel with little emphasis on politics, and I think that left me open to being able to tolerate Anderson's mistakes and lesser moments. (If you have read a lot of science fiction, you can't help but notice that many science fiction writers, including many of my favorites, are decidedly inconsistent in quality, as compared to, say, Vladimir Nabokov, who to my knowledge never wrote a lousy book. This may be because many SF writers to stay alive had to write very quickly. Roger Zelazny is one of my favorites, but I'm not going to recommend To Die in Italbar to you. I once heard Zelazny say that after he quit his day job  to be a full time writer, he had to write many books in order to make a living, but that every few books would be a "bear down" book that got his full attention. So Anderson sometimes putting out mediocre stuff doesn't make him stand out in the genre.) 

BTW: One of the points Michael seems to document is that RAW did his best thinking about Pound in that early essay, and his discussion of Pound apparently deteriorated through the decades.