putterings 395 < 396 > 397 index
the chore reading becomes even so
Readers who critically do the required homework will learn that Pound’s version of history is narrow and eccentric and will find his vision “unacceptable”; they will acknowledge the “reductive pedantry” and “puttering miscellaneousness” (the chore reading becomes) and admit, as Walker does, that the “ugliness of Pound’s ideas and ethics” make him “difficult to like and impossible to admire.” Even so, from a...
ex Sherman Paul, review of Jeffrey Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem : Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson in JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 90:2 (April 1991) : 270-274 (273) : link (jstor)
The discussion of Pound’s Cantos — where “puttering miscellaneousness” is found — is more interesting than the snippet above suggests. The book is borrowable at archive.org : link
Jeffrey Walker’s faculty page (at U Texas) : link
other things — including reviews of his Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000) — are listed at academia.edu : link
that just-named book is borrowable at archive.org : link
initial landing —
I linger here, because (1) the authors named — and Pound and Olson in particular — have detained me in previous lives, and because (2) I am brought back to my own time in a Berkeley classroom, in a course on Classical Rhetoric (ca 1977?).