Pound vs. Eliot

[milo]

So let's look at the idea of "the lying writer." Let's say that an author has done such a good job of concealing the truth about him/herself in his work, i.e., it points entirely away from anything that would help us to pin him or her down as in any biographical, historical, or psychological respect. So we can't tell if an author was sad, ugly, boring, a murderer, an Englishmen, alive during the Victorian era, a lesbian, etc. Pick any one of a number of these psychophysical attributes. First, we can say that even with the most disciplined writer, this is going to be difficult to do. (That Shakespeare was homosexual, for instance, may be debated, but a number of his poems seem to establish emphatically that he was).

Now, let's say that a given that author has done this with 100% success. What does this tell us about him or her?

This is all I've been trying to say to you. That someone has written something or said something at all can be used to adduce or infer something about him or her, personally, as much as the conceptual/descriptive content of his or her writing. So indeed, if you can see the lying writer behind the text, the fact that you see him as a liar shows me that you know something, however minimal, about him/her.

after carefully reading a number of an author's works, you will unavoidably get a sense of who they are as a person

no i won't at least not knowingly. all i'll get is a sense of who they are as a "the" poet or writer.

is jk Rowling a wizard if anything i'd have said it was a guy as she rights from the male heroic perspective.
Shakespeare because of the period certainly writes from the feminine POV in many of his plays and sonnets.
Lewis Carroll wrote with a child like quality and poe wrote in a sinister style but i don't know them. i can't win this debate because these people are dead but wait. ....stan rice the poet writes with style that suggests he's of or about the streets. (he isn't) Ginsberg's "a supermarket in California" doesn't really give me any meat of the man except top say he had a thing for wally whitman, Kipling's IF did tell me he was probably an old army boy in India but and this is the big. it doesn't give me any specifics. you only get those from inside stories and autobiographies. i'v seen bukowski on video and he comes across as a drunken bum. i never got that fact from his poetry. it's all summation. i get something of the person if i see the person and even then it will still be assumption. any good writer shows us what they want to show us, and a lot of the time it's fabrication mixed with something else. the emo writers who are new to poetry, they show what they often think poetry should be. we know of people because we sometimes see into their lives, hemmingway, plath, sexton, etc because of someone telling a story about them. sometimes untrue stories. so sorry but no, i don't see the persons behind the poem i only see the lying poet in the poem,

I wish I could remember the name of the logic error where you use observation of phenomena to prove causation. (possibly 'ipso facto" error)

Yes, much of Shakespeare's writing includes the POV of a homosexual and yet there is no historical evidence of him being a homosexual. Well, if you take your hypothesis of an author's writing always referring back to the author themselves, Shakespeare was, ipso facto, a homosexual!! You could accept that writers simply have the ability to write as different personas (what you call "lying" and everyone else in the world calls "writing") but no, you take this as proof both of your theory (an author's writing reveals the author) and as proof of Shakespeare's homosexuality.

Apologism at its best!

I have written many works from the POV of homosexual, sociopath, female, I shudder to think what this "proves" about me!