Overrated There are times when the overrated is obvious, and all one can do is wince. Anyone who sat through Maya Angelou’s inauguration drivel will understand what I mean. In their day the celebrity of a Carl Sandburg and an Allen Ginsberg covered over the slim poetic gift of each. It is plain that such poets, if they are remembered at all, will be footnotes in a history of social change, not of literature. The reputations of worthier poets ebb and flow with the restless tides of taste. A poet like Edna St. Vincent Millay was considered shocking in the 1920s and 50 years later was dismissed as sentimental. When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died in 1882, he was the most popular and beloved poet in the Englishspeaking world. A century later he was mocked and unread.

What undid Longfellow was the arrival of the modernist poets in the 1920s. Ezra Pound (who was, by the way, Longfellow’s grandnephew) and T. S. Eliot were determined to rid the poetic landscape of Victorian mawkishness. They championed a fragmented, psychologizing, egobound lyric in skewered free verse, and their model held, right through the rest of the twentieth century. Nowadays, of course, the gassy Eliot, the twittering Marianne Moore, the threadbare William Carlos Williams all seem to have long outlasted their cultural sway. The worst of them, and by far the most overrated, was Ezra Pound. Of course, critical studies of his work continue to pour off the presses, and he has long since been enshrined in the academic establishment. His apologists, too, remain busy. Pound’s treasonous broadcasts from Italy during World War II, and later his insane ravings from the lunatic asylum (his fame spared him jail time), are waved aside: The man was flawed, the work endures. This kind of apology has been used before to justify True Artists, though few of them were as “flawed.” Did Richard Wagner ever write, as Pound did, in one of his published letters, “All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil”?

Even if one were to accept the (specious) argument that art is beyond morality, Pound’s work is fraudulent. He was a good critic, a learned and inventive reader, and a decisive influence on many poets far greater than he. (Yeats was one.) But his reputation rests on a few delicate effusions from his early books, all of them redolent of the sachet. Pound himself staked his claim to greatness on The Cantos , the epic poem he worked on for decades and left incomplete at his death. Though it has been endlessly parsed and praised, it remains a complete mess. Sure, there are flashes of lightning, but they only emphasize the surrounding darkness. It is incoherent rant. That Pound is still regarded with awe saddens me.

Underrated Theodore Roosevelt’s young son Kermit, on a visit home from Groton, told his father that he