Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Fourteen: The Poet as Anti-Semite by Dave Jaffe

     Ezra Pound - The Poet As Anti-Semite; Section One


        It was 1943, right in the middle of World War Two. In Italy tens of thousands of Allied troops were fighting and dying as they clashed with German and Italian armies. Over 7,000 Canadians were killed in battles on Italian soil. At the same time, while this was going on, an American-born poet, Ezra Loomis Pound was broadcasting on Italian radio. He praised the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and poured scorn on the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
     "This man and his government," Pound claimed in effect, "are under the control of Jewish financiers." As Pound spoke his noxious propaganda, American troops were being killed by German and Italian troops also, just like the Canadians and other Allied troops. Ezra Pound was one of the great modern poets. Yet at the same time he was a racist, an anti-semite and a traitor to his own country.
    He was also a great critic. "During the crucial decade, approximately 1912 to 1922," said another great poet who was a friend of Pound, namely T.S. Eliot, "Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic in America."
     Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885. His father then moved the family to Philadelphia where Pound spent most of his youth. In his early teens he started to write poetry. He then went to two universities and tried to be a teacher. It didn't work out for Pound. So in 1908, he headed off to Europe with about $80 in his pocket. that would be worth over $1,000 to-day.
     At first Pound went to Italy. Then he went to England where he met many of the great poets of the day. He helped found the modern poetry movement called 'Imagism'. It did to English poetry what basically Pablo Picasso and Braque were doing to painting.
     "Do not retell in mediocre verse," said Pound, "what has been done in good prose." Pound attracted many followers but then he left this movement. Yet Pound was still active in the modern literary world. He published and/or promoted some of the earliest and greatest modern writers. People like Roberta Frost, Ernest Hemingway, 'H.D." or Hilda Doolittle, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence benefitted from Pound's advice and help.
     Ezra Pound helped create modern Anglo-American literature. Yet then came the First World War in 1914. This terrible event changed many people's lives, including Pound's. He wasn't the same afterwards. (To be continued).