7604
CORRESPONDENCE
MORE ABOUT THE POUND AWARD
Sirs:
It has been called to my attention
that my comments on the Pound Award
in the May PARTISAN REVIEW carried
an imputation of dishonesty on the
part of the Fellows in American Let–
ters. I made no such charge. I did
say that both the vote and the justify–
ing principle given out in the papers
evaded
every question raised by the
prize except the purely literary issue.
The suspension of human in favor of
literary judgments seems to me a
great error and a pretty dangerous one.
Each Fellow who voted for Pound had
arrived at this position in his own way,
and in my comment I tried to guess
how. I have never for a moment
doubted the honesty of motive of any
of these men.
Karl Sha piro
Sirs:
As one who has followed the contro–
versy raging over Ezra Pound during
the past few months, I should like to
take advantage of your invitation to
your readers to send in opinions to offer
up a few of my own for what they
may be worth.
First, it is probably better for us to
make the issues entirely clear at the
outset. Ezra Pound is a man and a
poet. As a man he is responsible to
human society for the acts which he
commits as a public man; as a poet
he is responsible to human society to
produce the best poetry of which he
is capable.
Ezra Pound as a man has joined
forces with the organized evil of fas–
cism and all that it entails: pogroms,
Buchenwald, etc. As a poet he has con–
structed an immense autobiographical
poem in which he gives utterance to
the doctrines of fucism.
The man Pound has been judged and
found to be insane by the United
States Government, so that problem is
not our concern. Our problem is that
of deciding the worth of his poetry.
Before going further, I should say
that I regard Pound, next to William
Butler Yeats, as the finest poet of his
time. I feel that as a poet his contribu–
tion to human civilization has been
too great to be safely underestimated.
He has taken us into areas of human
experience peculiar to our time and
explored them with more thoroughness
than any of his contemporaries, not
forgetting Eliot.
But should Pound have been awarded
the Bollingen Prize? The prize, we
must keep in mind, is awarded to
Pound the man; it can not be awarded
to a volume of poetry. In all honesty, I
can only reply in the negative. I did
not consider the latest addition to
Pound's
Cantos
to be the best poetry
of the year; my own ballot would have
gone to Mr. Tate for his recent col–
lection. But, leaving that aside, Pound
must take the consequences of his acts,
and those consequences are the inev–
itable results of treason. I would see
no harm in the judges saying that they
considered Pound's volume the best of
the year, but that, because of his acts,
they must withhold the prize from him.
Perhaps this is an unsatisfactory so–
lution; I must confess that I am not
sure. After all, how many of Pound's
contemporaries have shared or still
share the same beliefs? Yct, by not
acting upon them, or by acting only
with words, they have escaped censure.
Mr. Tate goes into a rage in your
latest issue due to a triumph of mis–
reading that is surely unusual in a
critic of Mr. Tate's undoubted prowess
at close reading. However, has Mr.
Tate ever condemned the treatment of
Negroes in the South? Has Mr. Eliot
ever condemned the atrocities of Da–
chau and Buchenwald, which were di-
