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     The Pound affair has been, as a whole, a terrible parody of He that is without sin among you – a parody in which Christ’s hearers end by seriously and righteously throwing stones upon the guilty woman. Even to somebody who thought Pound’s politics crazy, his poetry must have seemed tempered by occasional flashes of charm and genius. (Contrast Secretary Acheson’s statement about Hiss, which evoked so much anger, respect and astonishment simply because it was a personal moral statement – people expected expediency or cant – and went against this mechanical age’s assumption that public affairs are necessarily of a different order of importance from private ones.) Most people felt so extraordinary an interest in Pound’s case because here at last was an aesthetic question, a matter of art, from which the art could be almost wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality. Our time has been neither widely nor deeply interested in art – it preferred works of art secondhand, in criticism, and told the artist that he was saved or damned, truly employed, only as he belonged to a party, a church, or the Parents-Teachers’ Association – but it has been obsessively interested in politics and in the sort of public morality which consists mainly of unfavorable judgements about other people’s political statements. If Pound had murdered his wife and son, cheated his friends of their savings, repudiated every moral or aesthetic principle he possessed, and then been executed by the Italian government for his part in a conspiracy against Mussolini, he would now be remembered as an anti-Fascist martyr whose life had been blemished by certain personal failings. And he would still be, from time to time, the subject of violent attacks by [right-wing newspaper columnist] W[estbrook] Pegler and Senator McCarthy. Our time said: Tell me a man’s politics and I will tell you what he is; which is another way of saying I have no interest in what he is – this Man of yours is a hypothesis I have no need for. “Politics is death,” said Nijinsky – who was insane; “Politics is destiny,” said Napoleon to Goethe, and his statement has been admiringly repeated every since, to end in Mann’s monumental-statuary paraphrase: “In our time the destiny of man finds its expression in political terms.” What a destiny! what an expression! For the artist, for a “private man” – and in what matters most to us we are necessarily private men – Napoleon’s statement is more insane than Nijinsky’s; and today who has not begun to see in Nijinsky’s words a certain elementary empirical truth?

     Is it true that some of the worst people in the world vote with us, some of the best against us, no matter how we vote? That man does not live by virtuous indignation alone? That men themselves are more important than the systems which gather around their heads like clouds, and are dispersed like clouds? How few of us can say! These are truisms which it has seemed almost the profession of the living – those engaged artists – to ignore. Many people nowadays, in their bare mean fervent world of politics and its continuation, war, have been forced into so marginal an existence that they have only a few times in their lives been able consciously to afford the concessions, the absurdities, the irrelevancies, the saving graces, the inconspicuous waste, unfunctional ornament – the paying too much and asking too little – without which man is a poor forked animal. One goes from their suburbs of raw brick boxes, “where a roof itself cannot afford to jut out an inch over the wall it covers,” to the shady sooty streets of the past, to the big frame houses with their eaves and porches and dormers, all that excess the spirit inhabits – and one feels, with sorrow and terror, that along with these things went some ease and grace, disinterestedness and generosity and goodnatured indifference, for which there is no longer room in the houses our time can afford.

[What follow are complete paragraphs from notebooks drafts of ‘The Pound Affair’ and ‘Notes on Pound’. In the notebook they are interspersed with more fragmentary material, and with sentences and notes about specific poems: this was Jarrell’s usual way of writing an essay – as he got closer to publication he would untangle and rearrange the sentences and paragraphs he wanted.]

The virtuous left, top, good half of our time said to each of us: “You have one responsibility, the world. You must remember to treat each life as an end – wherever it is possible or expedient, that is – except your own; your own life is a means by which those other lives, present or future, can be changed for the better – when you yourself have become nothing but a means, a means to that end, you will no longer need to feel to such a degree, the guilt which you feel, and are right to feel, at present.”

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None of us need to read about the period of the religious wars; we have lived through those ourselves. Many people nowadays in the midst of our world of politics and its continuation by other means, war, manage not to believe some of the things that everybody believed, or was supposed to believe; to live as if their own lives, too, were ends, not means; to be an inhabitant not simply of the little Manhattan Island of the present, but went back to the past not for the lace and the castles, but for the extravagance of an age which had not yet become our Age of Iron, when people could afford to do things which had no immediate relevance whatsoever.

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One goes from this Manhattan Island of the present, everything carried to an extreme, lifeless extravagance never extravagance of leaves and flowers or unconsidered joy, with hysterical fanaticism – one goes back to the continents of the past not for the saints and the castles, but for the generosity and humanity that can flower from the common assumption that there are certain things which no one would find it possible to do, certain things which no one would ever find it possible not to do[.] Their poets often supported their feelings, and were disregarded when they did not; these people had not found, as we have, that all these beliefs are superfluities which a functional society or art or thought (will/can) eliminate; that the world can go on – or, at least, end – perfectly well without them.

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One of the American’s inalienable rights, one has to suppose, is saying anything at all that occurs to him about Ezra Pound. This new Selected Poems of his is a sort of index for a body of work, a question of culture (which it would be incongruous to write an ordinary review of); the book requires one to say a good many things, and a good many sorts of things, or else nothing.

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[I] once heard somebody over radio say we must make this the Century of the Educated Common Man. Pound always wanted passionately (1) to educate him by making him read and admire many things (almost all, naturally, in other times and other languages); (2) to indict him and his society for never having heard of it, for not being able to read and admire; (3) to look up to Pound [as a] great scholar for knowing, reading, admiring, and [the] fact that Pound was not a great scholar made this even more imp[ortant] to him; (4) to wink genially and knowingly, to band together loftily with his “own kind who mate upon the crag.” So this gave him tone of (1) missionary urgency and zeal, (2) of prophetic denunciation, (3) of endless reference, quoting in original scholarly (4) of witty supercilious allusion and superiority, and his great motto was[:] refer to cryptically, or if not that, translate in so mannered a way that only somebody who already knows the original can really get the translation, or if not that (but it rarely came to this point).

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If in Pound’s political life, in his obsessions with politics, he was foolish and immoral, in rest of his life he was not tho’ he was often exaggerated and absurd; about as objective as Romeo, but generous, brave, reckless, sincere, indefatigable in efforts for everything he thought good – had so much influence on poets that knew him precisely because they knew it was not an envious competitor of theirs speaking, but somebody so eager for well-being of Poetry that he was delighted in the [well-being] of the poet – exact opposite of one of my favorite living poets, whom I once heard speak of Shelley’s running around with other men’s wives in order, in his jealousy, to discredit Shelley with that audience.

     If you ever meet Pound there’s something sympathetic and appealing, a gentleness and delicacy, under all fireworks, so you can see how Yeats, Eliot and all the rest were able to be affected by him as they were. [He c]omes off worst if we take a Buddhist attitude, and count ignorant mistakes as sin; he was too much of an enthusiast, too little able to reason or get the distance from a thing that objectivity requires, ever to be correct about many things outside of poetry. Perpetual revolutionist; and if he took all his examples of what he wanted from the past, if he said it was the past his revolution was returning, would return us to, surely no one is so foolish as to believe there was ever any past like that; those highly selected jewels of interest seen through a glass brightly – through one of the brightest of all glasses, Ezra Pound.