Ezra Pound

MA, University of Pennsylvania

Can you be a great poet and still be a monster? Can you be a monster and still be a great poet? Is it possible to be a great poet, or even a good one, if you’re as much concerned with spreading your (fringe, nutty) ideas about economics—which lead you into the vilest kind of prejudice—as you are with poetry?

Behold the legacy of Ezra Pound: modernist pioneer, friend and confidant and editor and encourager of many of the early twentieth century’s great writers, innovator of poetic forms, admirer of Mussolini, fan of Hitler, and monstrous anti-Semite. “Controversial” doesn’t begin to describe him, both during his life and after his death.

The good news: He helped discover and mold the work of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot. He got Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock published and arranged for the serialization of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He invented a poetic style everyone called imagism and he called imagisme. He contributed two snappy one-liners to the phrase book about modernism: “Literature is news that stays news” and “Make it new.” He wrote many good poems, maybe one great one (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley), and a vast, uncompleted masterwork that exasperated everyone and which he despaired of at the end of his life (The Cantos).

The bad news: Like many, Pound was deeply disillusioned by World War I. He began to think about the war’s causes and ended up with a diagnosis of capitalism and usury. That led to anti-Semitism. He moved to Italy in 1924 and nine years later met with Mussolini. Pound tried to share with Il Duce his views on economics; the man who invented the word “fascist” brushed them aside, but later Pound said that he had “never met anyone who seemed to GET my ideas so quickly as the boss.”

Starting in 1939 Pound contributed anti-Semitic articles to Italian newspapers. During the war, the Italian government paid him to make hundreds of anti-Semitic radio broadcasts equating Franklin D. Roosevelt with “the Jews” and calling for America to stay out of the conflict. From a broadcast on March 14, 1942: “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew.… And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.” He also wrote for publications owned by Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, calling the Third Reich “the natural civilizer of Russia.” On the day Germany surrendered, Pound told an American reporter that Hitler was “a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint.”

The broadcasts were of course monitored by the United States, and in 1943 Pound was indicted in absentia for treason. He was arrested and placed in an outdoor cage in isolation for three weeks. He was transferred to the States, charged with treason, and admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeastern Washington, DC, for the next twelve years, starting out in a ward for screaming maniacs but soon moved to a more congenial wing. It was there that he concentrated on The Pisan Cantos, which he had begun in that outdoor cell.

Although he repudiated his anti-Jewish stance in public (perhaps to bolster the case for his release), he kept to it in private, refusing to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, denigrating people he disliked as “Jews,” and championing the known forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which had come out in 1903). Among his friends were anti-Semites and a famous Klan member. Bear in mind that, however unaware of the concentration camps the world was in 1946, the public was plenty aware—as was Pound—by 1949, when The Pisan Cantos won the Bollingen Prize, administered by the Library of Congress. The furor was immense.

In 1958 Pound’s friends hired a lawyer who moved to dismiss the wartime indictment, and it worked. Pound was released. He went back to Italy, but visited England and the States, where he was both feted and deplored. He became increasingly depressed. He thought The Cantos were “a mess” and told an interviewer, “I spoil everything I touch.… I have always blundered.” He died just after turning eighty-seven, in 1972.

Toward the end Pound told Allen Ginsberg, “Any good I’ve done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things.” Then, knowing full well that Ginsberg was Jewish, he added, “But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” “Stupid” because wrong, immoral, bigoted, ignorant, and a belief used to justify mass slaughter? Or because “suburban”?

Does it matter?