Ezra Pound Controversy | Leslie Fiedler (essay date 1969)
Leslie Fiedler (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: Fiedler, Leslie. “Traitor or Laureate: The Two Trials of the Poet.” In New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-ordinated Investigation of Pound's Poetry and Ideas, edited with an introduction by Eva Hesse, pp. 365-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
[In the following essay, Fiedler states that of the poets of their generation, history will likely give Robert Frost the popular acclaim and Pound the critical praise.]
In the United States, poetry has been for so long not so much bought and read as honoured and studied that the poet has grown accustomed to his marginal status. Unlike the novelist, he takes his exclusion from the market place as given, not a subject for anguish and protest but a standing joke, partly on him, partly on those who exclude him. Edmund Wilson was able to ask, as early as the 'thirties, ‘Is Verse a Dying Technique?’ and the mournful answer is...
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