There are two profound problems when approaching the work of Ezra Pound. First, he was, arguably, a better editor of other people’s poetry, notably that of TS Eliot, than he was a writer himself; and, second, how to come to terms with his exceptionally unpalatable political views. Pound, who played a key role in the composition and publication of that landmark of Modernist literature, The Waste Land, was a Fascist sympathiser and rabid anti-Semite whose propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Benito Mussolini and the Axis powers during the Second World War led to his arrest by the US Army in 1945.
Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and sailed for Europe in 1908. He lived in Venice, London (spending three winters as WB Yeats’ secretary at Stone Cottage in Sussex) and Paris before settling at Rapallo in 1925. He founded the Imagist school with Richard Aldington, co-edited Blast, which contained the Vorticist manifesto, with Wyndham Lewis, and championed the work of writers and artists such as James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska as well as TS Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.
Poems such as Homage to Sextus Propertius, published in Poetry in 1919, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, his “farewell to London” in 1920, established a reputation which he consolidated throughout the ’20s and ’30s by the periodic publication of portions of the Cantos, his perpetual work in progress.
Pound enjoyed a private audience with Mussolini in 1933, after which he published his ABC of Economics, and his fanatically right-wing social, economic and political views were reinforced by the gathering storm in Europe. He was not on the side of the angels; in 1939 he returned to the United States to urge President Roosevelt that, if America could not actively support Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it should at least stay out of the coming war in Europe and allow Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – and their über right-wing allies in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Croatia – to deal with the problem on the continent of communists, socialists, homosexuals, gypsies and Jews. Pound was all in favour of a Final Solution.
He broadcast on Radio Rome for three years, attacking the Allies and backing the Axis, and what they were doing in Occupied Europe and on the Eastern Front, until the downfall of Il Duce. Pound was captured by communist partisans, interned at a camp near Pisa – during which he wrote the critically-acclaimed Pisan Cantos – and then sent to Washington where he was indicted for treason. As a dyed in the wool Fascist he did not deny what he had chosen to say; rather, he defended his broadcasts as an exercise of his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. Pound was found “unfit to plead” and confined to St Elizabeth’s, a federal mental institution in Washington. It has never been clear whether he was really mad or this was just a convenient way of sweeping a problem under the carpet; putting a famous poet on trial for treason – and executing him when he was, as he would have been, found guilty – caused consternation in the capital. He was released 13 years later in 1958 and returned to Italy where he died, little lamented and largely forgotten, a once-influential figure pushed to the periphery of the literary world, in 1972.
But Pound has, in recent years, enjoyed something of a renaissance in his reputation. His important contribution in promoting and developing the work of others, especially his role in editing The Waste Land before its publication, has been underlined and his own poetry reappraised. Now, a little more than 100 years since he first crossed the Atlantic, comes a new edition of his Selected Poems and an edition of his Letters – most of them previously unpublished – to his parents edited by his daughter Mary with David and Joanna Moody, both of whom used to teach in the Department of English at the University of York.
As Richard Sieburth, Professor of French at New York University, points out in his introduction to the Poems, the most recent Faber revision of Eliot’s original selection of Pound’s poetry dates back four decades, and in America the New Directions edition has barely changed in 70 years. “Neither book carries annotation [and] to read Pound has always involved the invitation to become his student.” This is a scholarly and heavyweight project of almost 400 pages including 281 pages of poems, selected from A Lume Spento, originally published in 1908, to Translations in 1964; 67 pages of small print notes and an appendix containing essays by Sieburth, Eliot (his introduction to his own edition of 1928 together with his postscript of 1948) and John Berryman (written in 1949).
Reading Ezra Pound’s poetry in this way – at length – is like panning for gold. Some of the lines glitter, to be sure; some are solid gold, the real thing, and things of beauty as well as truth – “Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints, / splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows / In the wave-runs by the half dune” – but, as the ’49ers discovered in California, you have to pan a lot of gravel to find the nuggets.
Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley still stand up and parts of the Cantos are, of course, magnificent and there are also some delightful surprises, discovering such poems as Near Perigord from 1915, but the reader’s abiding impression is of a poet in need of a good editor himself; someone who could do for him what he did for Eliot.
We should be grateful to the editors and publishers who have produced these new editions for the light they throw on the life and work of an influential man of 20th century letters. But what, in the end, do we make of him? John Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, concluded: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The truth is that Pound was a great editor, a good poet and a lousy human being whose politics were reprehensible. As he wrote in the persona of Propertius: “Gods’ aid, let not my bones lie in a public location / With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it; / For thus are the tombs of lovers most desecrated … At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.”
