The Divine Pleasures of Cultural Warfare

Email to JC, sent via Litbreak!

Thinking about Pound’s and Eliot’s reactionary politics. I’m tying it into their, as moderns, well-worn opposition to the Romantic movement of the 19th century. A convenient target for conservatives.
Pound and Eliot hated the previous era’s romanticism. Why? Well. one reason, aside from a desire to try something different and purify their style of outmoded accretions, was that Romanticism was a progressive movement. Indeed, it’s the paradigm liberal movement. The romantics were rebels, resisting authority in favor of feeling…but there were also conservative romantics.
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…maybe that explains why Kenner attacks some modern poets and praises others. Does he want to celebrate the conservatives and trash the liberal poets? Cultural politics? His snide remark about Hart Crane…(thought it was snide…in The Pound Era) that the media paid special attention to Crane because he committed suicide, perhaps implying but not explicitly stating, that his celebrated poem “To Brooklyn Bridge” was overrated.
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Not all founding modernists were conservatives. Joyce was a rebel, wasn’t he, perhaps a closet Romantic?

But screw the politics. Just enjoy everything. Happy Christmas, JC.