Wilson on Ezra Pound

As I said, having Wilson around is like having fresh popcorn sitting around. You just can’t resist it. Here’s an amusing dart at Pound, and pretty much a justified one:

“[Pound’s] early poems were full of gallant and simply felt emotions; but they were already tainted with an obsession which has cursed him all his life: the frantic desire to flee as far from Idaho as possible, the itching to prove to Main Street that he has extirpated it from his soul. That he has remained unsuccessful to this day is sufficiently attested by the fact that he still spends so much time insulting the United States.”