What do you guys think about The Cantos and Ezra Pound in general? Is he worth my time?
No, he is anti-semitic and should be buried. It's 2015, we don't need that kind of influence
not worth your time but it has its moments
do NOT read his prose.
>>7379083
Didn't Pound himself say he was dumb for believing in that stuff anyway?
Find a volume of his Selected/Collected Poems and it will definitely be worth your while
The Cantos however are much more divisive and while I'm no expert I can speak from the position of someone who loves his poetry and couldn't manage to finish The Cantos
They're notoriously inaccessible and everyone I've spoken to who has invested the time to really read into them has said they wouldn't recommend it
I suppose whether or not you want to try The Cantos is up to you, but start with his shorter poetry first. They're not a good intro to his work that's for sure.
If you'd like, you can find many of The Cantos online to try giving them a read or pick up a volume of Selected Cantos which supposedly trims the work down to a much more manageable length and you can also get The Pisan Cantos which I've heard great things about and are sometimes considered a complete work by themselves
To recap though, definitely look into his other works if you've an interest in Modernist lit or Poetry in general
>>7379083
If you think this is anything like a common opinion, you're redpilled beyond hope.
Most of the academy has, sadly, committed themselves to the nonsense position that Pound was a good artist who went nuts. They try to divorce his fascism from his poetry in order to save him.
The very same professors who like to talk about problematic narratives etc. treat Pound as a founder of their own perspective: that he was suspicious of words and narratives and traditions, so his contribution to poetry and theory was this new open-mindedness. And then he just went (in a dry and medical sense) insane and supported fascism for who-knows-what reason. Nonetheless he wrote great poetry if you ignore the bits about Jews.
I think it is much more serious and noble to say that Pound was always a bit nutty; to trace the presence of bad ideology and bad morality in his work from Hilda's Book to the war broadcasts. It takes more effort to ignore the connection than to find it.
This is not to be bigoted and say that one error ruins the man. We can also point to the things which were good in him. When Pound says "I could have been a Catholic if only they'd let me pick my own saints and theologians" (paraphrased from memory) we are wrong if we only notice the imbecility of the statement. His admiration of Dante was strange and incomplete, but he did admire him for good qualities that he really had. And his translation of the analects, whatever its relation to truth, does reveal him to be a serious and thoughtful person in some degree.
He was, I think, a worse human being than the average one. But there is some humanity, and some genius for verse (though I think he is rather a minor poet) in him. When we look at Pound and his art we ought to see the whole man.
>>7379111
Ideas for a decent Selected collection for Pound ? Can't really seem to find anything decent in one volume...
>>7379073
>is he worth my time
Sounds like you're not worth his time, retard.
>>7379073
Wallace Stephens, TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost— hell, EE Cummings. All poets you could and should learn a lot more about literary Modernism in America before reading Ezra Pound
>>7379240
No. This is retarded.
>>7379242
>autodidacts
when will you learn?
>>7379334
>Presuming I'm an autodidact
Retarded pleb detected
>>7379338
only someone who knows nothing about literature would disagree with what I said
>>7379083
That sounds like a positive?
>>7379401
Your containment board is in the other direction, friendo
>>7379426
Anti-semitism is bad because?
>>7379432
it is illogical, and WWII
>>7379499
Why is it illogical to acknowledge an in-group bias?
>>7379426
>some things are off limits for poetic expression
>>7379523
>I'm an edgelord insinuating that anti-semitism isn't bad, but I'll pretend this is about poetic expression
>>7379125
What are people like you doing on this board?
>>7379111
This generally makes sense to me, but I'd suggest buying the Cantos as an investment-piece kind of thing. You don't have to figure on reading the whole corpus in a couple of weeks for it to be worthwhile to have.
>>7379574
it's not all faggots posting macros, family
>>7379561
>poetry can't be about "bad" things
>>7379608
>i'm continuing to smokescreen about poetry when I was called out on the unrelated notion that anti-semitism isn't bad
>>7379629
If you are against bad things you are surly against all art that glorifies or attests to violence and sexual abuse and crime committed against innocent people right?
You must hate rap music and violent video games
>b-but your just smoke sc-screening because you want to hate j-jews.
Or maybe I understand the slippery slope of censorship.
>first the came for the jews and I said nothing because I was not jewish.
>>7379210
Found two editions, both of them published by ff.
One's red, the other yellow.
The red one is titled Selected Poems and has roughly 200 pages.
The other one, the yellow book, is titled Translations and Selected Poems and has twice as many pages.
>>7379690
>the slippery slope of censorship
>>>/trash/
>>>/g/amergate
>>>/r/eddit
>>7379734
>DONT MAKE POETRY I DONT LIKE!!!
>DONT READ BOOKS I DONT LIKE!!!!
>DELETE THINGS I DONT LIKE FROM HISTORYY
>RRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEE
How did you become so coddled in life?
>>7379073
yes they're worth anyone's time but you have to be familiar with a lot of poetry in order to read them, and if you're asking if they're worth your time you're not familiar enough.
Would you pound Ezra?
>>7379739
Who do you think you are replying to? I didn't mention poetry or books or history in any form--the /pol/ guy kept bringing it up after his 'antisemitism is good' bullshit
>>7379773
his younger self is disputably cute
>>7379892
meant to say undisputably, sorry
Is it wrong for E-z to point out destructive in-group biases?
Calling out racists?
>>7379896
He is dreamy as a youngster
I am jelly of his fame and looks then.
Also he helped Joyce get noticed.
What a guy
>>7379942
this is great when you read it as a poem
>>7379210
>>7379696
This is the edition I've got.
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Translations-Second-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811217337/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1448227981&sr=1-10&keywords=ezra+pound
It's edited by the same man who did Pound's volume for the Library of America, and it's published by New Directions. It's a very good cross-section of Pound's entire output, and includes a good deal of the Cantos & his translations of other poems.
>>7379991
That was totally unintentional, but I'm half impressed with myself now that you point it out.
>>7379600
Unfurtunately.
>>7380154
Thanks a lot.
>>7379073
Pound is a brilliant poet. beyond that I don't give a fuck.
>>7379722
did you even read my post? nice stock response dipshit
I don't like Pound for being stupid about Christianity and for being a narcissist who thought humanity mostly idiotic. I also find it tiresome that he has such an antagonistic relationship to his readers
are all ezra pound fans insane? or just the ones on 4chan?
>>7379942
he helped Joyce with money that he begged from the elder ms Shakespear, whose daughter he was unfaithful to until the very end with a better-looking mistress—without any sense that it was immoral. And he was unfaithful to that mistress, too. It was all, I am sure, very modern.
we may call this beneficence. or we may say that he was willing to waste anyone's money to promote himself and the talented writers he attached himself to, and succeeded thereby in procuring for himself a lasting fame in letters.
He also convinced his wife to invest a good deal of her money in Mussolini'a regime. Indeed Pound was very generous to good causes with other people's money.
>>7383125
Sounds like he had an interesting life desu.
>>7383125
tldr: he was dedicated
