I recently bought a copy of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and ended up on a bit of an Ezra Pound kick, and decided to see if there were any recordings of his voice. Sometimes, they can be what you expect, like Hemingway or Roald Dahl, And sometimes you get surprises, like finding out that Cormac McCarthy has a higher voice than one might have guessed, or finding out William Vollman seems to have an obsession with the word “um”. But listening to Ezra Pound really threw me for a loop. See if you can notice anything odd:
Yep. He sounds like an old Scottish parson from a particularly out of the way kirk. Thing is, he lived in several places, from his birthplace in Idaho, to his early career in London, to Italy, where he spent most of his life after 1924 (except for the 13 years he spent in a Washington loony bin). Scotland was not among them. And if you don’t believe me about this, listen to this recording of one of his
more dog-whistley Cantos and tell me with a straight face you couldn’t imagine a minister in a Scottish kirk saying something very similar:
Yep. He sounds like an old Scottish parson from a particularly out of the way kirk. Thing is, he lived in several places, from his birthplace in Idaho, to his early career in London, to Italy, where he spent most of his life after 1924 (except for the 13 years he spent in a Washington loony bin). Scotland was not among them. And if you don’t believe me about this, listen to this recording of one of his
more dog-whistley Cantos and tell me with a straight face you couldn’t imagine a minister in a Scottish kirk saying something very similar:
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
![[Image: harmlesskitchen.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/yxR97P23/harmlesskitchen.png)
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
