Ezra Pound: Poet and Fascist
EZRA POUND, the poet, patron of writers and Fascist, was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885. Though he never spent much time there, he was always proud of his connection to this pioneer state of prospectors and cowboys. He felt eastern elites could be sterile and patronizing. The fiercely unconventional Ezra Pound was the only child of two pleasant, conventional parents. His father, Homer Loomis Pound, a Federal land officer, moved the family back East before Ezra was two years old. The Pounds lived in Wyncote, Pennsylvania and Homer worked for the Philadelphia Mint. Ezra’s mother, Isabel Weston Pound, stayed home and cared for Ezra.
Pound’s literary life moved from Romance literature to the pre-Raphaelites to Japanese Noh plays. He was a friend of T.S. Eliot and edited Eliot’s great poem, “The Waste Land.” Pound was a personal secretary to W. B. Yeats and either a friend, writing model or promoter of James Joyce, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway and Marianne Moore. Pound helped shape the broader artistic culture. He was a good friend to many of the Dadaists and surrealists of Paris. He popularized occult and mystical philosophy, and helped revive interest in the music of Vivaldi.
His father might work in a mint — but Ezra Pound vowed never to care about money. He held sharp views about the “corruption” of the banking system.
In 1901, when he was 15, Pound decided to be a poet. Like millions of teenagers before and since, he couldn’t believe he was related to his parents, and wanted a life far more intense and glorious than theirs. They embarrassed him — his father so meek, his mother so proper.
At 15, Ezra started at the University of Pennsylvania. He flatly informed Penn that he didn’t believe in distribution requirements. When various officials at Penn informed him that all Penn students must satisfy such requirements to graduate, Ezra left for Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. At Hamilton, with Professor William Pierce Shephard, Pound read Dante in translation, and fell in love with it. Dante’s “Inferno” was perfect for Pound, with its lush descriptions of Hell. It caught something about the way Pound’s mind worked — the fixations, the arrogant, fanatic interest in evil-doers, what they cost the world, and how they should be punished.
By age 24, Pound had decided he must be able to read poetry in the original and so he must learn many languages. In time, he learned nine languages. He wanted not only to know more about poetry than anyone in the world but also to have a perfect sense of what poetry — and could not — be faithfully translated.
Pound returned to Penn, earned a graduate degree in Romance languages, and in 1907, took a job teaching at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. But he was never sold on the idea of being a college professor. In his more judgmental moments, Pound felt college students could be divided into two camps: a small group who love learning and “insist on knowing” and a much larger group of stupid sheep pathetically waiting to be herded. The first group didn’t need his teaching; and the second group couldn’t properly appreciate it.
‘Don’t just read the good stuff — live it,’ he told students, friends and anyone else who would listen. ‘Live the best poetry.’ When people discussed politics or what was in the paper, Pound would frown and say political figures rise and fall, newspaper headlines change daily — but literature is “news that stays news.”
When Pound was kicked off the Wabash College faculty for being caught with a “chorus girl” in his room, he turned on Wabash College and never forgave it. An awful school, he said, a terrible place. Forever after, he referred to Crawfordsville, Indiana as “the sixth circle of hell” — where heretics were trapped in flaming tombs. In fact, he decided the whole United States was too Victorian and judgmental. He would move to Europe where people were open-minded. How he would support himself there didn’t worry Pound, but it did worry his parents. Just before Ezra sailed for Venice, they gave their son a small allowance.
Pound traveled to Spain, Italy, London, a blithe self-promoter. He proclaimed himself a fine writer, and turned out intense, colorful poetry. Looked at today, much of it seems like second-rate, pre-Raphaelite stuff. But he had skill and daring. He explored Japanese and Chinese poetry. Some say the best thing Ezra Pound ever wrote was a 14-word poem called “In a Station of the Metro” that he composed after riding the Paris metro.
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet black bough.”
In London, Pound wore a sombrero and earring, and pants made of green billiard cloth. He signed his name with a caricature of a gadfly, and loved to surprise and outrage people with extravagant words and gestures. He said any artist worth his salt shouldn’t marry, and that it should be illegal to marry a writer. If marrying an artist was absolutely necessary, Pound said, the passion should be only for the art; artist and spouse should take care not to see each much. (“Take tea together, three times a week.”) But in 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, and saw her a lot more than three days a week, for tea. In time they had a son. Pound also took a mistress, Olga Rudge, and with her had a daughter.
He could also be selfless, devoted to helping other writers. In 1914, he met T.S. Eliot, when Pound was a much better known writer than Eliot. Pound loved the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — “Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table…” Pound helped Eliot get “Prufrock” published. It was Pound, not Eliot, who broke the news to Eliot’s parents that their son had chosen not to be an academic but a professional poet. Pound always felt that T.S. Eliot was his discovery, and that the world should appreciate how he’d polished this diamond in the rough.
James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and many others gained from Pound’s creative generosity. Pound could spot talent and had connections at many small magazines. In 1917, he began editing a journal called The Little Review. Pound helped Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He tried to convince publishers to publish his proteges. He introduced them to wealthy, influential people who could help them. He defended them when critics panned their work.
Pound had the personality of an impresario. He could fulminate, and make a sensation. To reach the masses, he used slogans like “Make it new.” But he was also a gifted line editor, of either poetry or essays. He loved to match wits with another writer, to issue various challenges, to tell the other writer what Pound wanted more of, and less of, and then to read a new draft and find rebellious traces of those talks.
An artist’s work should not be static, Pound said. It should move, and show signs of struggle. He could be deliberately rude to a writer, probing their self-confidence, pushing to see if he could get them out of a rut. He told them art should “bear witness.” He wanted intensity from a writer, and liked to say: “The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”
Pound called himself “a highly mechanized typing volcano” and boasted that he could write a sonnet a day. He believed good poetry was closely related to music and to dance, and that poetry suffered when it moved away from these twin sources.
Ezra Pound hated old, dead ideas that should be stuffed and left in a museum, but were still trotted out by modern day Victorians. He disliked church music, and people who went looking for morality in art, or who tried to suppress “immoral” art. Despite his own use of slogans, he was suspicious of those who popularized art or ideas of any kind.
Pound felt all sorts of awful people were cluttering up the world. Sometimes, when he learned that someone he knew had killed himself, rather than grieve or be shocked, Pound chided the dead man for neglecting, on his way out, to kill off some of the world’s awful people. (“I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.”) He also was known to say: “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”
By now, he was a European, sentimental about Idaho, and scornful of suburban Philadelphia. He did miss New York City and once wrote of it: “No other urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
On one of the first days of January 1922, T.S. Eliot stopped off at Pound’s Paris apartment on the way from Lausanne to London, and dropped off a long manuscript which, after much editing, became “The Waste Land.” Both The Criterion and The Dial published the poem in 1922. Two other events delighted Pound in 1922: James Joyce’s Ulysses was finally published; and in Italy the fascist Benito Mussolini came to power.
In 1924, Pound moved to Italy. He also brought his parents over to Italy, got them settled and remained on good terms with them. Pound liked the way the Fascists drew clear lines: certain people were good; others were bad. Pound became an earnest Fascist and an explicit anti-Semite. He supported Adolf Hitler, and opposed U.S. entry into World War Two. And this wasn’t just fulminating at cocktail parties; Pound took money from the Italian government to deliver hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States and glorifying the fascist cause. He signed off letters with the phrase “Heil Hitler.” He called one of his broadcasts “The Jews, Disease Incarnate.”
On January 30, 1933, at 5:30 p.m. Pound had his only meeting with Mussolini. It was at Mussolini’s ground floor office at the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome, with its 40-foot ceiling. Pound presented Mussolini with two gifts, both written in English: a deluxe edition of Pound’s Canto poems; and a list, in Pound’s handwriting, of 18 policy ideas which he thought Mussolini would be wise to adopt. Pound’s favorite was the abolition of taxes. Mussolini instinctively spurned the economic suggestions of a cranky American poet. Turning to the book of poetry, he found this in Canto XVI: “Looka vat youah Trotsk is done, e iss madeh deh zhamefull beace!!”
“But this is not English,” protested the Fascist leader of Italy.
“No,” said Pound “It’s my idea of how a Continental Jew would speak English.”
Hmm, said Mussolini. He promised Pound nothing, but noted it would be easier to make use of his 18 policy ideas if they were typed up, and invited him to stay on in Rome in case il duce wanted clarification on something. Pound not only stayed on in Rome, but remained reverent toward Mussolini. He pestered the man’s private secretary for another appointment. But Mussolini had seen enough of Pound; there was no second appointment.
In May of 1945, Pound was arrested by U.S. forces and charged with treason. The fascists had started a war that had killed perhaps 60 million people, including six million Jews, and Ezra Pound had been a cheerleader for their side. The U.S. public looked on Pound as a piece of scum. Whereas he felt, as in Crawfordsville, Indiana, that his critics were being far too judgmental. Pound regretted nothing he’d done, at least not publicly. He remarked as he was arrested: “If a man isn’t willing to take some risks for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.”
Pound was not given a lawyer or any chance to refute the treason charges. U.S. soldiers slapped Pound in a 6-foot by-6 foot “gorilla cage” where he was held outside, in extreme heat, for 24 hours a day, with no bed, no chance to exercise, or to talk to anyone. The cage was floodlit at night, making sleep even harder. It was something out of Dante; Pound had fallen into Hell. After 25 days of this, Pound became unhinged. He later said “the raft broke and the waters went over me.”
Judged mentally unfit to be tried for treason, Pound spent the years from 1946–1958 in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., against his will. A panel of experts visited him in that brick hospital which stood at one of the highest elevations in Washington. The experts pronounced Ezra “schizophrenic.” Journalists wrote casually vicious attacks on him, protected from libel suits by Pound’s status as a “traitor” and a schizophrenic prisoner.
Saint Elizabeth’s was poorly lit, and smelled of urine. Pound was a political prisoner with tender neck vertebrae, housed among rapists and drug addicts. Some prisoners in nearby cells screamed for hours at a time. But it wasn’t all bad. Ezra played some tennis and had a long stream of visitors. He worked hard to translate from the Greek two works of Sophocles: “Women of Trachis” and “Electra.” Here in this bricked mental hospital, with its air of stale futility, Ezra Pound worked on his art. He saw no reason why being accused of treason and held in a virtual jail should reduce his literary output.
When Ezra first arrived, the director of the hospital visited and said that since Ezra was a writer he would certainly want to contribute pieces to the hospital newsletter, “Saint Elizabeth’s Sunshine.” Ezra did not want to do this. Nor did he take part in group activities at the hospital. He refused medical treatment whenever he could, for which the hospital branded him “uncooperative.”
Many people who had known and liked Pound couldn’t bear to visit him at Saint Elizabeth’s. The atmosphere of a loony bin was just too frightening. Or they felt visiting a traitor to the United States and a famous hater of Jews might get them fired. Poetry lecturing gigs might dry up if it was known they’d gone to see Ezra Pound in his disgrace. So most of the people who visited Pound were either foreigners, who didn’t care what Americans thought of their friendship with Pound; or young hippies and beatniks, many of them poets, whose job prospects were few and uncertain, anyway. Guy Davenport, a quirky character who became an acclaimed English professor at the University of Kentucky, wrote a dissertation on Pound’s poetry, and visited Pound once a year between 1952 and 1958.
Pound could be gruff and abrupt with his visitors but, if you knew him, you could tell he enjoyed being visited. If he liked a visitor especially, he would abruptly say: “What day would you like?” That meant: ‘I hope you’ll keep visiting me, and I’d like to schedule the visits ahead and give you your own day.’ It was sweet, but understated; Pound hated to be needy or sentimental. Friends and fellow writers worked behind the scenes to get him out, and in 1958 they finally succeeded. Released, Pound returned to Italy. He died in 1972, in Venice, and is buried there.
Pound’s record as a fascist and anti-Semite is disgusting — but does that cancel the value of his writing? What about the Pisan Cantos (1948), a poem in 120 sections, each section a canto? And there is “In a Station of the Metro.” Ezra Pound could write, was a brilliant editor of other writers, and a loyal, resourceful friend.
His friend Rex Lampman loved Pound’s bluntness, his gruff honesty. In Ezra’s last years, Lampman told Ezra he had an epitaph ready for the sad day when Ezra would die.
‘What is it?’ said Ezra Pound.
He beamed when Lampman replied: “Here lies the Idaho kid. The only time he ever did.”