Ezra Pound is a problem for Modernist literary studies in the same way Martin Heidegger is for Continental philosophy: it’s impossible to deny the overwhelming influence of either figure—and impossible to deny that both were devoted anti-Semitic fascists from at least the 1930s to the end of their days. Heidegger kept his views mostly hidden in his “Black Notebooks.” Pound, on the other hand, became an enthusiastic mouthpiece. He publicly idolized Benito Mussolini, signed letters with “Heil Hitler,” and broadcast paranoid anti-Semitic hate speech on Italian radio in over a hundred propaganda pieces for the Axis powers during the war.
Pound was to be sentenced for treason in 1945 but was saved by an insanity defense promoted by Ernest Hemingway (who convinced himself Pound must have been insane to say such things.) After a stay in St. Elizabeth’s, Pound recanted, but privately he never changed. If he were a lesser poet, critics and readers might assure themselves they’d never read the likes of him today. But not only is he inseparable from literary history as an influential editor and booster (without Pound, no Eliot’s The Waste Land), but he is rightly recognized as one of the most gifted poets of the 20th century.
“Is it wrong to love a fascist?” asked Ash Sarkar in a take on the Pound problem that lists him among many “problematic faves, along with The Simpsons and Vybz Kartel.” The “vituperative” anti-Semitism of Pound’s later years finds its way into his later Cantos—the massive, unfinished, eclectic, erudite, and deeply obscure series of epic poems he worked on from 1915 to 1962. “Canto XLV,” notes Sarkar, “one of his many attacks on financiers, is suffused with antisemitic language and imagery.”
Canto XVI contains what Mark Ford calls “a characteristic specimen of Pound’s mimicry,” which Mussolini found “entertaining” during their first and only meeting. (“It’s my idea of how a Continental Jew would speak English,” Pound supposedly told Il Duce.) Such moments of racist mockery alternate in the Pisan Cantos—published in 1948 and written during the war—with elegies, economic and political theories, and archaic lines in which many readers hear echoes of blood and soil mythology. We may hear such an echo in Canto LXXXI, from which Pound reads above, over footage of him wandering around Venice.
Allen Ginsberg described Canto LXXXI as “a collage of Pound’s prison mental gossip (thinking to himself in prison, notating down… little nostalgic recollections of pre-World War I.)” There are, however, gestures toward more recent events. He refers to the “friends of Franco” in one line, for example, and Hélène Aji identifies Pound’s reference to Thomas Jefferson as an allusion to Mussolini. How did Pound himself square his nationalism with his cosmopolitan modernism? Literary scholar David Barnes speculates:
The writer would have seen no conflict here. Pound could easily switch from his Hitlerian fantasies to a recommendation of the kind of artists (Joyce, Marinetti) that Führer would have classed as “degenerate.” In his mind, the sharp lines of modernism seem to have been equated or even interchangeable with the totalitarian politics of Nazi Fascism.
Except it wasn’t Nazi Fascism that Pound mostly hawked—though he enthusiastically recommended Mein Kampf. It was the Italian original. Mussolini did not share Hitler’s extreme antipathy for modern artists. He too saw modernism and fascism as interchangeable, as did the many Italian artists he coopted as propagandists. Pound was not especially unique in such circumstances.
It’s not clear when this film footage was shot, but the reading was recorded in Spoleto, Italy during the summer of 1967. You can listen to the full recording above, and hear another version, and dozens more recordings of Pound, at Penn Sound.
Related Content:
Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)
Rare Ezra Pound Recordings Now Online
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Pound did not only usher T.S. Eliot onto the world stage. A 40 year old Robert Frost, who could not get his poetry published in the USA, sailed to England because it was common knowledge that Ezra Pound, if he liked your work, would not just get you published but much more importantly he would get you reviewed. James Joyce’s Ulysses had it not been for Pound tireless championing would never have seen the light of ink. And as for Hemingway, the popular novelist spent a bit too much time hero worshipping trash like Lenin and Stalin. He went even further than Pound when it came to shooting one’s mouth off…
To understand Pound — why he got himself into such a mess is not easy. One might start trying to grok Pound by considering his father’s job as Assistant Assayer at the US Philadelphia mint. Old Homer Pound (any gleam in that name?) came home after work at night and sat at the dinner table explaining to his boy the importance of the purity of the money — the gold and silver coins stamped at the mint had to be precisely so much noble metal and so much base (copper). Then consider the cultural war in Pound’s later youth between capitalists and socialists. And finally consider the First World War, in which economic strategies ultimately turned into martial strategies and a civilization was erased in some areas — such as Russia — and crippled in Western Europe. Pound blamed the economics for the deaths of so many artists in the War. And after the war, the young editor of Italy’s largest daily socialist newspaper returned, after months recuperating from injuries, from the war with a new way of thinking about economics, a reconciliation of socialism and capitalism: fascism. And Pound was hardly alone in his enthusiasm for this radical new thinking: in 1936 one of the Fascist Quadrumvir — one of the four including Mussolini who ran Italy — Italo Balbo stunned the world by leading a squadron of Fascist aircraft from the Bay of Naples to the World’s Fair in Chicago, Il. The Fascist big cheese Balbo was made honorary chief of the Sioux, given a tickertape parade, had a street named after him in Chicago and a monument to his achievement erected there in Balbo Park. It stands today and the park is still Balbo Park. Pound was hardly alone in admiring Fascist Italy. To him the new Italy was a logical further evolution of the great Italian civilization spanning almost three millennia. The curious thing to me is his reaction to Hitler. I would have expected his reaction the Rome-Berlin pact to have echoed Italo Balbo’s: Balbo jumped into a plane and flew to Rome, calling a meeting of the Quadrumvir and berating Mussolini for allying Fascist Italy with Nazi Germany. But the world seems to turn on just one axle: when the War broke out Pound went to Naples to make the arrangements to return to the US. However, a supercilious clerk at the US Consulate threw up a flurry of obstacles to Pound, who had let his US passport expire while in Italy. In a fit of fury one would anticipate from the likes of Ezra Pound confronting an obdurate bureaucrat the great Poet huffed and stormed back to Rapallo to sit out the war. Pound’s money in the US was inaccessible to him in an enemy country: he had to find some kind of work. Manning the vegetable counter at the local grocer would not have been appropriate for the greatest living poet. Friends found him work making broadcasts over shortwave radio out of Rome. He would be free to say whatever he wanted with no limits or restrictions. That is definitely not something appropriate for the likes of Ezra Pound: he truly believed his defense in 1945 that he was exercising his right to free speech. Isolated from friends (TS Eliot over in England, Hemingway back in the US, Joyce and Yeats both dead) Pound became a one man show: The Ezra Pound Saving Western Civilization radio show as only Pound could have dreamed up. And he paid dearly for his excess, his hubris. Pound the poet became the victim of his own overweening pride. As he himself observed in his Pisan Cantos. Imagine his cantos and you figure his radio speeches. Not likely lugheads like FBI agents and federal prosecutors would be amused or otherwise impressed. The usual tactic is to throw out a half dozen or so outrageous statements by Pound among the hundreds of hours of broadcasting — which not during wartime would indeed constitute mere freedom of speech. Pound lost his perspective. You don’t have to like what he had to say — just concede he was put in that position by a federal bureaucrat, was granted laissez faire by the Italian authorities, and said what he wanted. And for that one of the greatest minds in the long course of Western Civilization was treated like a Lord Haw Haw. Unbelievable. At least Eisenhower had the decency to cut him loose and send him back to Italy.