Reviewing Daniel Swift’s The Bughouse, a biography of Ezra Pound’s later years, Adam Kirsch examines the dangerous ideas of the American modernist poet and traitor, and argues that they not be ignored:
Pound lived in Italy throughout the fascist period, and he was an ardent admirer of Mussolini, in whom he saw a reincarnation of the Renaissance patron-warlords he wrote about. During World War II, Pound—still a U.S. citizen, although he had lived in Europe since 1908—made numerous propaganda broadcasts in English on Rome Radio, aimed at convincing American soldiers of the perfidy of capitalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Jews, among other targets.
This made him a traitor, and at the end of the war he was captured by a band of Italian partisans and turned over to the U.S. army. He was imprisoned at Pisa, first in a cage, then in a tent; and it was in these piteous conditions that he wrote the lines [later included in one of his major works, The Cantos] that sound so much like an apology. . . . Perhaps all his fantasies of poetry hand in hand with power were just so much “vanity,” [these verses seem to imply]. Yet it was hard to give up the fantasy, and [the poetry he wrote at the time] also contains some of his most virulently anti-Semitic and pro-fascist verse. . . .
Swift [also] draws the reader’s attention to the toxic legacy of Pound—the racist drivel he continued to write during his [postwar] incarceration, and the white-supremacist disciples who formed another contingent of visitors to the mental hospital [to which an American court had sentenced him to live for the remainder of his life]. While Swift is on the whole quite sympathetic to Pound as a man and a poet, his portrait does not shy away from Pound’s essential ugliness—his petty, banal prejudices, his monomania, his conspiracy theorizing, his admiration of violence and oppression. . . .
In the 1930s, enough people did share Pound’s anti-Semitism and fascism that [those ideas] became world-historically important, rather than individually disturbing. [That is why] his case calls for stringent judgment. . . .
Read more on New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry/2017/02/why-ezra-pound-was-most-difficult-man-twentieth-century