People of my age naturally think that 1976/77 was the similar moment in pop music but it's less likely that younger people recognize it as such a seminal point and older people will identify it as Elvis Presley's first records.
So I wondered where others might have identified their own seismic shift, like did Bach think it was Monteverdi, did the Georgian poets think it was Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley, and, in fact does everybody think it occured 100 years before them. It seems difficult not to regard one's own time as the time that all history was aiming to arrive at and the future as a long aftermath that will follow it.
Those examples suggest that we might expect a revolution every hundred years and thus be on the brink of one now. I can't see one but I'm sure I'd be the last to notice. I'm not going to worry about it too much but I don't suppose history has finished yet and future generations will need to tidy it all up somehow even if we are all individuals in a our own minority of one resistant to being categorized alongside others. However individual we like to convince ourselves we are- which suggests we are really still in the Romantic Age- we are, however reluctantly, much more the victims and followers of fashion than the free-thinking inventions of our own devising that we would like to be.
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Not consciously as a result of all that, but obviously connected to it, I thought it long overdue that I had another look at Ezra Pound to see if I could make any headway at all in understanding his poems.
I re-read Thom Gunn's introduction to his 'Poet to Poet' Faber selection, and it did make some sense, and glimmers of hope emerged as I followed up his references to some of the poems. So now I've embarked on Noel Stock's biography and, so far so good, it's an excellent book.
I had first rejected Pound out of hand as a fascist, needing no more than an old-fashioned doctrinaire ban on anything so abominable and that saved me for many years from the second objection that I simply 'didn't get it' anyway. But the ominous fact that both Gunn and Donald Davie held him in such high regard wouldn't go away. and surely anything admired by those two was worthy of my greatest efforts. And, so here we are, starting to appreciate Pound's pared-down principles, dry wit and cleansing English poetry of extraneous decoration. I'll hope to at least think a bit better of him. Whether or not it results in a big fat Collected Ezra becoming essential reading is another matter. .
