Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Fourteen, Section Two by Dave Jaffe

The Poet As Anti-Semite; Ezra Pund - Section Two


         The First World war skewed Ezra Pound's politics to the far right. In the aftermath of the war he started to write long history poems that he called 'Cantos'. These poems were full of quotations from history, the sayings of historical figures and quotes from Japanese and Chinese poems.
     Pound zeroed on what he called 'usura' or usury. Jews, he claimed, who loaned out money, were responsible for the ills of the modern world. At this time Pound was reading the works of the Social Credit leader Major Douglas. Soon, Pound, who moved to Italy, ended up supporting the fascist dictator and ruler of post war Italy, namely Benito Mussolini. On the radio he denounced the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and preached a virulent form of anti-semitism.
     Alas, Pound wasn't alone in denouncing Jews. Some of the great early modern writers were anti-semitic too. These included T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, maybe Virginia Woolf, (although she married a Jew), Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, and the famous French novelist, Louis Ferdinand Celine. Celine and the writer and visual artist Wyndham Lewis were pro-Adolf Hitler. Lewis wrote a book praising Hitler.
     Anti-Semitism ran rampant in many countries before the Second World War,  and was part and parcel of the belief systems of millions of people.
     Still, Pound was a great poet. "The best of Pound's writings," said Ernest Hemingway "will last as long as there is literature." Hemingway also said that the Cantos  of Pound were Pound's  greatest writings. 
    After the Second World War ended, Pound was captured by the Allies and was  charged with treason. He could have been shot as a traitor. His defense pleaded that Pound had been mentally ill when he made his broadcasts over Italian radio. Quite a few scholars of literature also came to his defense. Pound was then imprisoned in a hospital in Washington, D.C. He was released in 1958 and went back to Italy where he died in 1972.
    "There died a myriad," wrote Pound in his post world war one poem 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'
    "And of the best among them
    For an old bitch gone in the teeth
    For a botched civilization."

      This was Pound's vertdict on the First World War.
    Pound married once and he and his wife had one child. Then he hooked up with Olga Rudge and they had a child together. Rudge stayed with Pound until he died. Pound's life and work shows us that artistic geniuses can also be bigots, racists and traitors.