It's Pound's poetics and bully tactics directed at other artists and writers that I object to. I think that was the Pound that was moving into fascism and basic poetic incoherency, though. I do understand that the younger Pound was very good to some artists and writers, including Hemingway, and his later fascist activism really caused some of them considerable consternation because it made it very difficult for them since they owed so much to the earlier Pound. I think many artists had to suck up their misgivings in order to be part of the history of art engendered by Pound and the Imagists. I feel their pain, I really do.
And I also like Frost, a great poet in my opinion. But Frost's influence on our current dismal spate of American poetry was minimal at best, whereas Pound's deplorable influence was far too great. His poetics opened up the door to extreme laziness and a disrespect for the long traditions of poetry as great art, that required a facility with the magic of words and the ability to weave them into great art.
As for the egregore, I was really using it metaphorically, as a negative term for the shadow of our collective unconscious and the memes contained therein that have infected our minds on a very widespread basis. If I recall, the term was coined by Victor Hugo without any particular occult attribution or connotation. The epic poem in which he used it, called The Legend of the Ages -- written from the standpoint of Hugo as an eavesdropper at the door of legend, depicts humanity in scenes painted in words on the wall of centuries, evolving in a positive direction from darkness into light. However, if Hugo were alive today, it is quite likely that his voice would be silenced or marginalized into insignificance. That is very likely because our society has fallen under the spell of the negative aspect of the egregore, now in the grip of powermongers with a very large and dark shadow. And if there is indeed a collective unconscious operating as this egregore, it is one very much adumbrated with the dark brush of our lesser demiurges.
So there’s a cautionary thought, that the kind of artist who once changed and shaped society for the better no longer exists in any meaningful or significant way, just as the Pound who was good to his artist friends fell under the dark spell of a huge ego interested only in destroying the poetics of the past for the sake of a future of language without the magic of poesie. And by that magic I mean both the "mousika" and the "tekhne" -- the music and the technique that hold an audience spellbound with its sound, imagery, and message.
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