"Something else happens when he “hears” Ezra Pound first. In 1963, he wrote to Tony Tanner: “am now working my way through Pound, for this new course next semester. I must say, there isn’t really much there in Pound, is there?” Three years later, he tells Tanner, “With Canto 2 or 47 or the other splendid bits of Pound, I completely forget all the bullshit about Usura”, and by the 1980s, the Cantos have become a completely integral part of his imaginative resource: “We don’t think of them as disasters, do we?”, he writes admonishingly to Clive Wilmer, “We think of them as defining a new sense of form. What needs emphasizing is that the best of the Cantos are as solid as writing can get, for example, I don’t see how Canto 47 could be better, in any way.” John McAuliffe on Thom Gunn DRB

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