Ezra Pound's daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet's legacy from fascists

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/14/ezra-pound-daughter-fascism


Mary De Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound's 86-year-old daughter, has gone to court to stop a neofascist organisation using her father's name.

The Italian castle where the poet Ezra Pound retreated in the 1950s to work on his epic poem The Cantos could scarcely be more remote, perched on a sheer rock outcrop against snowy peaks on the Austrian border.

More than half a century later, Pound's 86-year-old daughter still savours the isolation of Brunnenburg castle's lofty wood-panelled and book-lined rooms, where she reads the poem to visitors and mulls over her extraordinary upbringing by the renegade US poet.

But Mary De Rachewiltz's peace has been shattered by the murky world of Italian neofascist politics and the fallout from a bloody shooting spree through Florence's ancient piazzas that left two immigrants dead in December.

Angered by the decision of a rising fascist group called CasaPound to name itself after her father in honour of his support for dictator Benito Mussolini, De Rachewiltz is seeking through the courts to force the group to drop the name, and has accelerated her efforts after a CasaPound sympathiser shot dead two Senegalese street traders and wounded three others before turning the gun on himself.

[EFerrari]

1. It's sad to see anyone use the crown jewel of English poetry

in this way. Good luck to her.

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2. +1

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3. One of the smartest things I ever did was to read the whole canon with Thom Gunn.

It was worth every single POS that I had to go through just to be in that classroom. He made fun of the Romantics and especially beat up on Yeats and Stevens, lol. But when we read Pound, it was like being released into a different ocean. I'll always be sorry those sessions aren't on tape or film anywhere. He was a handsome man, not a particularly patient one, with a sense of humor so dry it could set off the ceiling sprinklers.

Thom Gunn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Gunn

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4. I love the Romantics - but that course sounds

Fabulous!

He seems like a guy who was truly up to the task.

[EFerrari]

5. Three courses over two years.

And worth every second. When he made fun of Stevens, my inner hall monitor had a fit, lmao. But he had a visceral dislike of pretension and we heard about it.

But that's the thing about Pound. He could out-Milton Milton and still have a good reason for every flipping pretentious reference in every line. He was just dancing on some higher floor than the rest of us. You just have to admire the nerve, and I guess Thom did enough to herd us to a point where we could. Maybe he was more patient than I give him credit for. lol