“Beauty Is Difficult”: On (Still) Reading Pound

While Pound’s influence on twentieth-century poetics is widely recognised as unparalleled, the legitimacy of his work – its very literariness – is also often called into question, with claims that his fascism and antisemitism disqualify its achievements. As attempts are made to diversify and “detoxify” the curriculum and interrogate the prejudices of the canon, what to do with an author like Pound? Reflecting on my own experience of reading him, this essay engages with this difficult legacy and its impact on the work’s transmission. It considers some of the expedient approaches that have been adopted to decouple aesthetics and reactionary politics, arguing instead that the difficulty encountered in confronting the work should not be shied away from. What, it asks, is Pound’s relevance at a time of renewed politicisation of the cultural sphere, in relation to discourses around so-called “cancel culture” and an “evangelising” tendency in the assessment of cultural forms?