Madam, - So "David Wheatley is a poet and critic"? Well then, with such fine literary credentials it is inexcusable that in discussing Ezra Pound he must resort to such vague and lazy language ("The vain theories of a village explainer", Books, May 13th). Pound's economic theories are "blather" and he is "stupid", no less!
Pound's politics may have been vile and I am no apologist for an anti-Semite, but is "stupid" really the best he can do in analysing one of the most influential poets of this century? Not only does this do an injustice to Pound's intelligence, it in fact lets him off the hook, for it ignores the question of how he and so many undoubtedly brilliant writers and thinkers could hold anti-Semitic views or be "fair-weather fascists". May we say that TS Eliot and WB Yeats are also stupid? To do so is to avoid the hard task of criticism and merely betrays the arrogance of the critic.
Give me the "dull stretches of the Cantos" over dull criticism any day. - Yours, etc,
AENGUS WOODS, Brooklyn, New York, USA