[Pound] was the greatest poet of the age!…

The one poet who heard speech as spoken from the actual body and began to measure it to lines that could be chanted rhythmically without violating human common sense, without going into hysterical fantasy or robotic metronomic repeat, stale-emotioned echo of an earlier culture's forms, the first poet to open up fresh new forms in America after Walt Whitman—certainly the greatest poet since Walt Whitman … the man who discovered the manuscripts of Monteverdi in Venetian libraries and brought them out in the twentieth century for us to hear; the man who in his supreme savant investigations of vowels went back to the great musicians of Renaissance times to hear how they heard vowels and set them to music syllable by syllable and so came on the works of Vivaldi also, and brought him forth to public light…. (p. 180)

Pound told me he felt that the Cantos were "stupidity and ignorance all the way through," and were a failure and a "mess," and that his "greatest stupidity was stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice," he thought—as of 1967, when I talked to him. So I told him I thought that since the Cantos were for the first time a single person registering over the course of a lifetime all of his major obsessions and thoughts and the entire rainbow arc of his images and clingings and attachments and discoveries and perceptions, that they were an accurate representation of his mind and so couldn't be thought of in terms of success or failure, but only in terms of the actuality of their representation, and that since for the first time a human being had taken the whole spiritual world of thought through fifty years and followed the thoughts out to the end—so that he built a model of his consciousness over a fifty-year time span—that they were a great human achievement. Mistakes and all, naturally. (p. 181)

Pound I think affected many people in many ways, mostly in very revolutionary and charming ways, like Imamu Amiri Baraka probably came a great deal out of Pound with the particularism of his Black revolution. So the net substance and sum of Pound's energy finally comes to mean the liberation of the voice, liberation of the vowel, liberation of conscious attention to language, purification of language…. (p. 182)