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FINALLY THERE IS the uproar over the award of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in the Pisan Cantos in 1949, a matter that hits at the very heart of the conjunction of poetry and politics in Pound's life. Heymann simply recounts the attacks, defenses and counterattacks on the committee for making the award, without ever proffering his own opinion. Karl Shapiro--who was on the Bollingen committee, and voted against the award--seems to have had the best idea--that a poet's moral and political philosophy could not be separated from his poetry. But then Shapiro, like...
...make distinctions between Ezra Pound the poet and Ezra Pound the man, one can still distinguish between the poet/man and the poetry...
Heymann gives us a profile of the poet/man, and in many ways it is deficient. It doesn't try to clean up the mess that has surrounded Pounds life, the almost inscrutable clusters of prose that make up Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, the incomplete information in Charles Norman's biography, published in 1960, 12 years before Pound's death or Noel stock's The Life of Ezra Pound, completed two years before the poet died. But for all of its problems, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower provides us with one particularly important piece of information. That at least...
...center of Rome in the middle of the day. He [Pound] was photographed at the head of a neo-Fascist, May Day parade, stepping their way up the Via del Corso from the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina to the Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriana. They wore jack boots and black arm bands. They flaunted banners and shouted anti-Semitic slogans. They gave the Roman salute and displayed the swastika. They heaved rocks and bottles at the crowd, overturned cars, attacked bystanders...
Then silence "fell," as Heymann puts it, not quite as conveniently as it descended on Pound in Kenner's book, or as it seemed to pervade Pound's later life in Stock's biography...