4 - Dissemination

Summary

Pound showed little interest in becoming a literary influence in the sense of encouraging poets to sound like him, to employ his mannerisms, or to write poems in imitation of the Cantos. (One Cantos, like one Finnegans Wake, should be sufficient.) He practiced what he preached, the essential doctrine of a literary modernism always making it new, keeping things moving. Thus his highest praise for Zukofsky came in 1954, when the younger poet had finally “got OUT of influence of E.P. and Possum [Eliot].” Zukofsky's earlier work had “more Ez/ in it than I thought,” but at last there was no trace of “linguistic parasitism,” and “damn all I think yu have got yr/ own idiom” (PZ 208-9). It is hard to imagine Pound enjoying some of the verse for which he has been invoked as an ancestor, especially many of the rambling, “open” American poems of the 1960s and 1970s which recorded, as Daniel Hoffman puts it, what one saw from the window of the bus.

A poet may select ancestors, but not descendants: Pound has had more claimants to his heritage than did Howard Hughes. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing to our day he has been enlisted in skirmishes of the long paleface-redskin wars that run through American literature. Important, overtly tendentious documents in those battles have been the influential anthology of 1960, The New American Poetry and its 1982 supplement, The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. Here the palefaces, often associated with Eliot, are poets “in longstanding obeisance to academically sanctioned formalism.” The redblooded heroes of the melodrama are those variously called “projectivists, the poetic “underground”, the New York School, the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Moun tain Poets, or, most generally, the avant-garde.” They are the “most truly authentic, indigenous American writers, following in the mainstream of Emerson, Whitman, Pound and Williams.” The latest postmodern invocation of Pound as ancestor comes from some of the writers associated with the 1980s pheonomenon, the L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poets, who combine with an hermetic aestheticism devoted to pure Venture, the elimination of the “subject” and an intention of neo-marxist subversion via the avant-garde; in their manifestos and statements of poetics Pound at times finds himself in such odd company as Stein, Althusser, Barthes and Derrida.