Poets and Politics

...Indeed, despite his literary elitism and the idiosyncratic interpretation he gave to Jeffersonian principles, Pound always wanted economic justice...

...T. S. Eliot was anti-Semitic, too, but he tended to be more discreet about it than was Pound (though, of course, he could be outrageously direct when he wanted...

...The experiment will fail...

...By writing The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Chace has opened up new avenues of investigation into a subject that is at once difficult, troubling and profound...

...At the same time, they were proving that genius does not necessarily go hand in hand with Blakean and Shelleyan liberalism...

...Chace interprets the prejudice as stemming both from Pound's parents, "nou-veau-poor" Americans hostile to the immigrant groups who were then transforming the nation, and from Pound's own antipathy to monotheism—the "disease" of the Hebrew and the Hindu—as well as his devotion to the mythological...

...Indeed, nothing can excuse such statements as the following, made during a shortwave broadcast from Rome in 1942, and featured in an appendix to Chace's book: "Corrupting the whole earth, you have lost yourselves to yourselves, and the big Jew—not the little Jew—that big Jew has rotted every nation he has wormed into...

...The first half of this century was a remarkable period...

...And although this stance eventually brought the poet to C. H. Douglas' social credit ideas, in the early '20s he carried on a brief flirtation with Marxism...

...He is, moreover, among the first to make clear that Pound and Eliot were not simply reactionaries, but in many ways rebels and revolutionaries...

...He also makes an interesting comparison between the poet's anti-Semitism and that of the industrialist Henry Ford...

...And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions...

...It is for this reason that Canto 42 praises the damn good bank, in Siena A mount, a bank, a fund a bottom an institution of credit...

...In rejecting the world, and by implication, politics, Eliot is really saying that without religion, specifically Christianity, there can be no secular world...

...Furthermore, the author reminds us at some length that anti-Jewish sentiments were characteristic of many of the period's writers, including Yeats, Lawrence and Rilke...

...Pound, for one, consistently opposed the status quo: The very soul of the Cantos, as Chace points out, is "the immense historical deposit of bad government, bad men, evil banks, and unearned increment...

...Yet Chace occasionally seems to make too much of this linkage, particularly in his discussion of Pound's anti-Semitism...

...Thus, in "Thoughts After Lambeth," he wrote that "the world is trying the experiment of trying to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality...

...Such a trend is a healthy sign in criticism, and especially worthwhile in the cases of Pound and Eliot...

...As Professor Chace notes, "The studies done in the 1960s by George Dek-ker, Donald Davie, Daniel Pearl-man, and Herbert Schneidau . . suggest that one may discuss, with understanding and good grace, and within the usual sort of literary analysis, the ideas underlying Pound's Cantos and the vast majority of his prose writings...

...For, as the poet was often to repeat, echoing Jefferson, "The earth belongs to the living...

...In linking Pound's art and politics, Chase justly maintains that even Pound's "approach to totalitarianism" was "esthetic...

...And so it is not at all strange, as Chace points out, that Eliot was committed to the theories of Charles Maurras, Georges Sorel and Irving Babbitt...

...Associate Professor of English, Queens College This is an important book, confirming the present tendency among critics and scholars to confront head-on the embarrassing politics of major 20th-century writers...

...That is, the poet's desire to see the arts flourish led to the emphasis on, and concern with, order which is so apparent in the famous Canto 13: If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him...

...What Chace demonstrates is that Eliot's "humble," "modest," elitist posture was in fact aggressively political...

...Still, one questions Chace's final claim—that Pound's anti-Semitism 'may be evaluated most productively as an altogether logical corollary to his philosophical and esthetic principles, not as an inexplicable divergence from them...

...To be sure, a poet who insists that civilization cannot exist without Anglo-Catholicism is making an authoritarian political statement...

...that, for example, behind the anguish in Ash Wednesday ("Because I cannot hope to turn again/Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something/Upon which to rejoice") is a position explicitly affirmed in the poet's famous royalist - classicist - Anglo - Catholic declaration...

...Reviewed by Harriet Zinnes Author, "Waiting and Other Poems," "An Eye for an I...

...That he was not demonstrably a supporter of the English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley was due more to his squeamishness, to his fastidious attachment to the upper classes, and to his repugnance to the "sordid" display of Mosley's followers on the streets of London than to his political beliefs...

...Chace argues—conclusively, it seems to me—that the political beliefs of the two poets are inextricably linked to their literary achievements...

...At that time, he wrote to congratulate editor Mike Gold for putting out The New Masses...

...Similarly, the political aspects of Eliot's writings tend to be more subtle, more "cunning," than are the overtly political Cantos, and consequently, Eliot's work, especially the latter part with its seemingly exclusive religious subject matter, may well require Chace's balance and lucid examination to convince readers of its political orientation...

...Pound himself, looking back years later at his raucous anti-Semitism, called it stupid and provincial...

...American writers were stunning the world with their genius...

...And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order...

...Chace observes that Pound's "moral is the obvious one: that it is good to found a public institution, not for individual profit, but for the purpose of extending life to all the people of a city...