But I think there's also room to consider if the act of creating the work/art encompassed some of the abhorrence. Like, if a non-abhorrent movie had an abhorrent production. That has an extra wrinkle compared to Pound's poetry. Because then it could be argued that the abhorrence was instrumental in the art's creation, even if the art itself was ostensibly innocent.
True, but Auden wrote his paragraph in the context of a different information technology environment.
Today, say artist X puts out objectionable content Y and harmless content Z. You could argue that consuming Z is all fine and dandy (side-stepping questions of whether financially supporting X is a good idea) because you are not supporting Y.
But the giant AI neural net models around us aren't so smart. The more views Y gets, the more it starts suggesting Z to other people. In a world where simply consuming a work also literally boosts its signal and the signals of all other works by that artist, the question of whether a non-offense of work should be shunned takes on a very different character.
It is quite another to continue that support when the person takes actions that are treasonous on the one hand, and supportive of murderous and barbaric activities on the other.
The world was engaged in an existential fight for the very ability to speak freely at the time. Many people lost loved ones in this fight, and the cost was very high.
And Pound decides he's going to lend his talent to the people killing of Jews and anyone else who got in the way of the fascists.
But while this was happening the US had shipped Von Braun and other Nazi scientists over to the US, IBM's practical contribution to the Holocaust was being quietly forgotten, the industrialist Thyssen - who provided substantial funding to Hitler and could be argued to have made WWII possible - was being allowed to live a very comfortable life having been punished with a fine of just 15% of his net worth, and there appeared to be little interest in investigating the role that US industrialists and bankers, including the grandfather of George Bush, had played in association with Thyssen and other industrialists. In fact many of their confiscated assets were quietly returned.
Against this background Pound's actions had exactly zero influence on the course of the war and the fate of the holocaust victims. The real causes were elsewhere. And not only were the people responsible never deplatformed or otherwise challenged, many never faced any significant criticism of their actions.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...
What the people running the US government and other allied governments did after the war in the face of the massive Soviet threat really has nothing to do with this case.
Perhaps you can explain how a fascist propagandist was supposed to be involved in the "massive Soviet threat"?
But I think we need to carefully consider the scope here, as well. Auden was so adamant about including Pound's work because he believed the work itself had strong literary merit (even though he wasn't a huge fan on aesthetic grounds), and did not advance or espouse Pound's fascist views. If Pound's poems had been all about loving and spreading fascism, my reading of his letters suggests Auden would have advocated for dropping them.
Certainly there are modern cases we debate here on HN where there are parallels to the Pound situation, and I'm convinced we sometimes (often?) make the wrong decision. But many of them involve deplatforming people who are using that platform to spread racist, sexist views and/or spread lies and misinformation. There is no artistic merit to that sort of thing, and being tolerant of that is a threat to a just, equal, equitable society.
Regardless, we still must be cautious when giving a platform to a toxic person who creates non-toxic art, because if we give that person fame, they will be granted more reach and access to spread their toxic ideas as well as their non-toxic art. For this reason, I generally won't come down too hard on an organization for deplatforming someone whose work itself is seemingly unobjectionable.
I think Auden went a bit too far in hyperbole, at times: dropping a work from further publishing runs is not remotely like burning books. In the first case the original prints are still available. This is even more true nowadays when so much is digitized, and copies of old works are essentially free.