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“When art you love was made by ‘Monsters’: A critic lays out the ‘Fan’s Dilemma’”:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1174293359/monsters-a-fans-dilemma-review-claire-dederer
 | Do geniuses get a “hall pass” for their behavior? Or, do we “cancel” the art of artists who’ve done “monstrous” things? That’s the question Claire Dederer tackles in her new book. www.npr.org |
When I was growing up, although we usually listened to the Metropolitan Opera live Saturday matinée radiocasts, my mother wouldn’t tune in for Wagner operas, because of the composer’s virulent antisemitism (and Hitler’s worship of his music).
Likewise taboo in our household was the poetry of Ezra Pound — my mother felt he should’ve been executed for treason during WW II for his propaganda support of fascism; instead, his pals got him declared mentally ill so he got off with passng a few years at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in DC (later host to John Hinckley, Jr., BTW).
As you likely suspect, Pound’s writings were largely a moot point — although I have a vague recollection of a HS English course including one of his poems. In 2004 this came back to haunt me, however, when I needed to track down the English-language original of a poem in Portuguese translation in Álamo Oliveira’s novel I No Longer Like Chocolates. Before you ask, yes, Álamo cited the author in his novel, just not the poem title, and the darn thing wasn’t online back then so I had to go plodding through a doorstop of a Pound poetry compendium I checked out of Oakland’s Carnegie Library — oof! By sheer luck, it was a relatively early piece of Pound’s, so the 95-year maximum copyright on it had just expired.
