The Unpoetic Pound

...But as Surette points out, genteel anti-Semitism did not lead these people to become Nazi sympathizers...

...But I strongly recommend his book— not only to readers interested in Pound, but as a cautionary tale about how obsession can undermine character...

...John the Divine to veto a memorial to Pound in its Poets' Corner...

...Pound was, in short, a more malign version of the Wizard of Oz...

...Ostensibly meant to explain some economic home truths to his erstwhile countrymen, those speeches were heavily larded with rantings against the "international Jewish conspiracy" and the government of his native land, while they lauded the Axis powers...

...Canada and New Zealand briefly experimented with Social Credit, which proved to be based on faulty assumptions...

...From that point until his capture by the U.S...

...Pound was captured in 1945 and repatriated to the U.S., where he only escaped execution through the intervention of a number of well-known American writers, including Archibald MacLeish and Robert Frost...

...Eliot, James Joyce, H.D...

...Nevertheless, Pound embraced it as a simple solution to all of society's wrongs, especially the difficulties faced by artists in a culture devoted to free enterprise where junk often sells better than carefully crafted work...

...But, as Surette observes, even if the old poet actually uttered those words, they constitute a pretty lame apology for living under a tyranny and cheering on its systematic deprivation of a particular group's civil rights...

...Last year he and Demetres Tryphonopoulos edited a collection of Pound's correspondence with Olivia Rossetti Agresti that revealed Pound had not renounced his fascism or belief in a Jewish conspiracy after the War, as many argued, but continued to express these views well into the 1950s...

...Pound's belief that governments ought to listen to him, and that some actually did (notably Mussolini's Italy, although it did not embrace Social Credit, a fact the poet overlooked), stood his friends in good stead when they were making a case for Pound's "insanity...

...Surette shows how the unshakable self-confidence that had made him a successful impresario for his fellow modernists worked against him in economics...

...By the mid-1940s, he was spouting much of the rabid anti-Jewish rhetoric to be found in Mein Kampf...

...Though some might feel it is time to retire these arguments about a 50-year-old episode, the Poets' Corner veto underscores the abiding need for Surette's study...

...On the other side of the cathedral dispute, the Times quotes poet Donald Hall, an elector, saying: "I nominated Pound and I know the horrendous things that [he] did, and I also know that he was a great American poet not only in his own work, but a great facilitator of the work of others...

...The poet was the sort of person who could not accept that anyone who disagreed with him might have a point...

...Furthermore, he was an arbiter of style: Modernism's famous battle cry, "make it new," is his...

...Surette's own extensive research has uncovered a more coherent picture of the development of the poet's ideas than previously available...

...I would add that to the extent he embodied modernism, his story illuminates its dangerous side: a slavish devotion to theory, and ruthlessness toward those who don't subscribe to its values...

...My own reading is that Ezra Pound represented that archetypal American figure—the entrepreneur with a nose for the Zeitgeist, the huckster who possesses a kind of mania for trying to fob off on the public whatever product he happens to be selling...

...Eliot, W.B...

...Many people remain unwilling to forgive the poet for the traitorous and inhumane views they believe besmirched both his life and his worth as a writer...

...This is the first time the congregation has intervened, and most of the electors are miffed at Dean Harry S. Pritchett's ruling...

...Alas, to their adherents they offer a clear explanation, as well as a potential solution, for the woes of the world...

...I admire him and I suggested him for his poetry, but there were so many things in his career before he became a megalomaniac and paranoiac...

...and many others owed much to his support and encouragement...

...Surette's scholarship and the complexities of his subject do not make light reading...

...Army, he devoted himself increasingly to serving as a propagandist, first for "Social Credit" theory and then for Benito Mussolini's Fascist ideals...

...His hateful ideas were the outcome of his own character weaknesses, combined with getting in over his head in the area of economics...

...Yet Pound kept on very good terms with his own Jewish friends, the author notes, even while he became convinced that "Hebrew culture" spelled the destruction of Western values...

...She successfully argued, according to the New York Times, that "The belief in art for art's sake is neither Christian nor Jewish...

...They also opposed increasing the money supply...

...The anti-Pound movement was led by Marcia Ra, a member of the Cathedral's governing board who also happens to be a Holocaust survivor...

...Indeed, G.K...

...His longtime friend Wyndham Lewis aptly termed him "a revolutionary simpleton...

...Moreover, he saw himself as being no less influential in the world of economics than he had become in literary circles...

...Normally, a body called the Poets' Corner Electors—made up of prominent writers— decides who should be included in the relatively new American version of the venerable British institution at Westminster Abbey...

...Initially, as Surette documents, the poet did not share the prejudices of so many of his friends...

...A number of books and articles have recently examined the penchant for anti-Semitic opinions among certain modernist writers: T.S...

...If they couldn't see the truth of what he said, either they were stupid or they were the enemy...

...His volume documents how Pound's political and racial obsessions stemmed from his growing involvement with economics during the 1920s and '30s...

...We are not a temple to the Muses...

...Instead, he was declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity and confined to St...

...Chesterton—from whom Eliot received much of the basis for his attack on "Jewish culture" expressed in "The Idea of a Christian Society"— violently denounced Hitler's policies after the pronouncement of the Nuremberg race laws and the events of Kristallnacht, declaring himself ready to "die defending the last Jew in Europe...

...That his actions retain the power to stir up trouble has most recently been demonstrated by an incident this fall that came too late to be mentioned in Surette's study: the decision of New York's Episcopal Cathedral of St...

...From the last two Pound "discovered" the villains who kept the rest of the world from embracing his idea of a just economic system: the "Elders of Zion," who controlled banking and the money supply in an attempt at world domination...

...Above all, Pound really was a troublemaker, and in the end he became so perverse as to be genuinely evil...

...A professor at the University of Western Ontario, he has written two previous books about Pound—one a critical exegesis, the other an examination of the poet's relationship with the occult...

...They maintained that "industrial economies suffer from a disequilibrium between productive capacity and purchasing power that blocks the distribution of goods and services,' and advocated a kind of equalizer called "the national dividend" to make purchasing power more universal...

...Yeats and Virginia Woolf have come in for particularly heavy criticism in this regard...

...Most of Pound's defenders assume that he really had gone crazy by the time of the offensive broadcasts, and that his true work—poems like his Cantos—shows an essential compassion...

...Pound, however, traveled in the opposite direction...

...I think that the malice of his madness is not relevant to his stature as a poet...

...Before you take sides in the current argument about the American Poets' Corner, read Pound in Purgatory to understand exactly what is at stake...

...Ra's campaign revives memories of a not entirely dissimilar fracas back in the 1950s when the chancellors of the Bollingen Prize tried to award it to the still incarcerated Pound, only to have their choice blocked by the foundation...

...Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., from 1946 until 1958...

...How he came to a far more offensive position makes for ugly reading precisely because the path he started along was such a gentle slope at the beginning, and because, according to Surette, he never went crazy...

...A new book by Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory·: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Illinois, 302 pp., 39.95), marks the latest attempt to make sense of this American modernist poet who directed radio broadcasts from Fascist Italy at English speakers during World War II...

...All such conspiracy theories sound absurd to those who don't hold them...

...In the 1920s, Pound espoused the notions of the Social Creditors...

...Hall represents a longstanding position, shared by numerous distinguished American writers of the modernist generation, that genius should be judged on artistic worth, not ethical lapses...

...Revulsion against thuggish, active racism made most moderni sts better humanists...

...Of late, many of them have taken further comfort from a remark the poet allegedly made to Allen Ginsberg in 1967, characterizing his anti-Semitism as merely "stupid suburban prejudice...

...Surette himself continues to admire Pound's verse, despite having become disillusioned by his character...

...In the process, he was seduced by the ethnic scapegoating that is the dark side of many a populist movement...

...Unfortunately, this has always sounded too much like what Ginsberg wanted to hear to convince me...

...The problem was that Pound had no head for economics, and this was clear to everyone except him...

...Pouxd's grandiose talk, though, sounds more boastful than crazy, and does not excuse his fatal attraction to bullying demagogues like II Duce, Father Coughlin, and eventually Hitler...

...Donald Hall rightfully praises Pound's generosity toward fellow writers...