Comparisons are odorous

If you ever want to find an attractive poet -- and believe me I've tried -- you could do a lot worse than Ezra Pound. I am voting him my number one GILF, or gratuituous literary fittie (the 'I' is for eye-candy):

I've recently become interested in early photographic portraits, and the way that posing evolves from stillness to capturing motion, and therefore from intense formality to an intense privacy. Here for example the three-quarter profile is interesting-- head slightly tipped downwards, with an almost blossoming smile. Caught in his shirt-sleeves, this is clearly a private picture and not a public portrait -- and even the pose seems to demonstrate the modernist opposition to everything conservative, suburban and Victorian. It also gives we fitcritics a boner.

In his capacity as (m)advisor to T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, he demonstrated an incredible ear, and even better hair:

It is interesting to imagine how Pound would have styled himself with today's sartorial accoutrements. One can only guess what the invention of hairspray and the tortuous manlegging would have done to the poor dear - perhaps the noxious fumes and loss of circulation to the vitals would have only exacerbated his rampant anti-semitism and splendid unreason. Witty and sesquipedelian to the point of incomprehensibility, I would therefore propose for my odious comparison this little chappy, the Ezra Pound of booky wooks:


Take heart, Russell: even the best of us make mistakes on the radio.