The Perverse Affections of Ezra Pound: A Response to Larry Scanlon

Abstract

I must confess that I have not thought about Ezra Pound for quite some time. Of course, I have taught his poetry and recited facts about him in my classes. I have even discussed how to interpret the complexities of Pound's various experiments with poetic voice, but that is not precisely the same task as thinking about him. I probably have not thought about him seriously since I decided somewhere around the late 1990s—along with a host of other literary scholars—that Ezra Pound was your garden variety brilliant but authoritarian modernist, certainly an agent provocateur, but not someone whose aesthetic and poetry I would return to and reinterpret with any earnest effort. For me, Pound's work embodied what he himself called “the Totalitarian Synthesis,” in order to name that curious melding of art, artist, nation, and culture that flourished in the modernism that came into being during the age of excessive nationalism and state power. I had certainly never bothered to devote any serious consideration to Pound's relationship to the medieval, the intense study of medieval and Romance languages that he undertook during his graduate education, or his revision of the tropes of laureation and courtly love. However, Larry Scanlon's article has me thinking about Ezra Pound again. By discussing Pound in terms of laureation and, particularly, in terms of courtly love, Scanlon has offered us a new metric by which to measure Pound's poetic and political perversity, for it is at the level of its perversity that Pound's extorted yet innovative logic might just provide us with a coherent way to discuss his aesthetic. What I will offer are my thoughts about this perversity and then pose a few questions.