With someone like Pound, for instance, you can’t appreciate the poetry without anguish because you can’t disentangle its aesthetic achievement from its political affiliations; to do so would be to trivialize both.

I found that quote in an essay by Alan Shapiro in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The quote is attributed to Donald Davie.

I’m also interested in new ways to read Pound (though it’s been a while since I did) because, like Heidegger or like Man Ray, his personal/political history make it hard to disentangle from the aesthetic. And here’s this great summation: we don’t untangle because we can’t. And the idea of reading Pound with ‘anguish.’ What a concept. Amazing.