The Ezra Pound Paradox

Ezra Pound was a great artist – and a real-life monster. How do we approach his art if we can't disentangle the two?

Ezra Pound following his arrest on treason charges, May 1945.

I never planned to study Ezra Pound. When I started grad school, my intention was to burrow deep into James Joyce’s Ulysses. My interest in Joyce stretches back years, long bordering on an obsession; since first encountering his work, I’ve read, reread, thought, and written about him continually. An early attempt to read Pound’s Selected Poems, on the other hand, left me cold.

No, I didn’t go out looking for Pound, but he found me anyway. My first week, I set out to write a seminar paper on him; less than two years later, I was presenting a short paper on the Pound panel at MLA, the largest conference in English lit. I did come round to Joyce again, appropriately enough – “Longest way round is shortest way home” – but only after a long detour through Pound. The journey left me ragged and dirty, but alive. Terribly alive.

What sustained – sustains – my interest in Ezra Pound? I’ve been thinking about him for a while, digesting it all – his work, his life, the other great writers he helped bring to the world – wondering how and whether to write about him again. For now, I can at least try to sketch out what animates my interest: the challenges, the visionary boldness, and, above all, the tension between unquestionable aesthetic value and deplorable moral value. Lately, I’ve been thinking of it as the Pound Paradox.

Ezra Pound was a great poet – one of the greatest of the last century. His best work is bold and exciting, providing a unique experience for the dedicated reader. For certain personality types, it may also help that reading him feels provocative and dangerous, especially in an age where the value of art is often determined according to a simplistic moral calculus. The moral challenge of reading Pound adds to the aesthetic challenge, providing ambitious readers a chance to fully assert their right to independence of reading and thought. With poetry like this, there’s no safety net.

But, in Pound’s case, the moralists are onto something. When any story or song with less-than-perfect politics can be denounced as “dangerous,” it can be tempting to write off the concept entirely. But if there really is such a thing as “dangerous art” in that other sense – not Charles Bukowski, pissing-off-the-squares dangerous, but legitimately dangerous in its embrace of destructive ideas – Pound’s surely fits the bill. He was a monster; he was a traitor. He was an unrepentant Fascist, and his political commitments are infused in his work. Maybe they can be ignored or brushed aside for a little while, but never for long.

These two sides of Pound – the Master and the Monster – cannot be separated. They feed endlessly into each other like the two sides of a Möbius strip. And, maddeningly, I’ve been trying to unravel them for years, even though I know for a fact it can’t be done. I keep being drawn in by the curve.

Pound the Master

Portrait of Ezra Pound by Man Ray, 1923.

For literary types, Pound has become notorious to the point of overshadowing his significance to American literature; for the general public, he’s more or less a complete unknown. Many of the writers he helped usher into publication, however, are household names: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost are the heaviest hitters. Pound had a sharp eye for literary talent, and his curatorial contributions still endure.

His poetry, though, has never been as widely read as Eliot’s or Frost’s. His best-known work is probably the two-line “In a Station of the Metro,” the quintessential expression of the Imagist style:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

¹

But “Metro”’s brevity is deceptive. Pound produced an enormous body of work, encompassing not just original poetry – many, many volumes of it – but reams of literary and cultural criticism, political polemics, economics tracts, translations, and journalism. He founded and participated in multiple poetic movements and was a crucial advocate for the literatures of China, Japan, and the Harlem Renaissance. He edited the quintessential Modernist poem, The Waste Land, and was a major influence on Yeats’ late career, making him partly responsible for important works like “The Second Coming.” Without Ezra Pound, the shape of 20th Century literature is unimaginable.

Pound’s magnum opus is The Cantos, a 900-page epic poem written over the course of half a century. Initially modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Cantos continuously evolved in style and content over the course of its composition, reacting to both major world events and Pound’s ever-shifting intellectual obsessions, always searching for a modern Paradiso. Allen Ginsberg claimed the poem’s value was as a “model of [Pound’s] consciousness over a 50-year time span” and called it a “great human achievement.” I’m inclined to agree on both counts. There is nothing else like it in world literature.

The Cantos, like most major Modernist works, is dense, difficult, and allusive, requiring familiarity with a dizzyingly idiosyncratic gallery of subjects to begin drawing much meaning from it. Without a guide, newcomers must rely on the sense that there’s something enticing going on under the surface to carry them through – that there’s more to this opaque, chaotic work than meets the eye. What follows is no more than a glimpse through the keyhole.²

Pound famously described The Cantos as a “poem containing history,” and it’s his ability to give that history tangible expression through carefully arranged scraps, translations, and flecks of personal experience that gives his epic its power. He brings the past to you and lets you touch it, feel its textures and shades. Take, for example, the opening lines of Canto 1:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward,

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coiffed goddess.

Here, by quoting from the Odyssey (and, as any English teachers reading this will note, beginning in medias res), The Cantos announces itself as an epic. The language is vividly Homeric; the translation is suitably Poundian, infused with an unmistakably modern character. The effect is poetry that gives the impression of simultaneously belonging to two different moments of history. Canto 1 comes to us in 2022 manifestly marked by both antiquity and 1917.

But this is a simplistic reading, offering only a skeletal understanding of Canto 1’s interplay with history. Every translation doubles itself in this way, after all: every translated text is really two texts, carrying two distinct historical moments in tow. But, typically, the translator aims to conceal herself. The goal is for you to feel as if you’re reading Dostoevsky, even though you’re really reading Pevear and Volokhonsky. Pound takes a different approach. After 67 lines, he intervenes in his own recitation of Homer:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,

In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.

By including this note, Pound is adding sinew to the translationary bone. This narrative interruption – the first of many – reveals the passage’s source is not just Homer, but a 16th Century Latin translation of Homer by Andreas Divus. Canto 1 is a translation of a translation. If the opening of Canto 1 is the poem announcing itself as an epic, these lines offer an important clarification: The Cantos is a Modernist epic, as concerned with technique as it is with subject matter.

What is The Cantos’ technique, exactly? I’ll borrow from Italo Calvino’s definition of “classics”: “the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left of the cultures they have passed through.” That shuffling of texts Calvino associates with the classics – their movements through time, culture, language, and experience – is Pound’s poetic method. On each page, many histories reverberate – including his own.

The Cantos often employs Pound’s personal history to striking effect. See, for example, the first sustained use of this tendency in Canto 3, which draws from the poet’s experience living in Venice in 1908:

I sat on the Dogana’s steps

For the gondolas cost too much, that year,

And there were not “those girls”, there was one face,

And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti”,

And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Moronisi,

And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.

Gods float in the azure air,

Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.

Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.

Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,

And from the apple, mælid,

Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,

A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,

And there are gods upon them,

And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,

The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,

As Poggio has remarked.

Green veins in the turquoise,

Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.

A guidebook might tell you that the reference to “Koré” comes from a translated line of D’Annunzio and refers to the Palazzo dei Leoni, or that “Poggio” is Renaissance humanist Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, who rediscovered dozens of lost and forgotten classical Latin manuscripts. But one doesn’t have to grasp these references to appreciate Canto 3. Its gorgeous, evocative language is enough to stir the reader. The scene is vividly conveyed through rich description and fragments of personal impression: Pound sitting on the steps of the Dogana da Mar in Venice, looking out over the Grand Canal. Again, for a moment, you’re brushing up against history. The allusions only add dimension and depth.

The rest of The Cantos build on the complex interplay between cultural artifacts, historical documents, and personal impressions, continuously evolving to encompass more and more objects of Poundian interest. Homer and Dante; Confucius and Kublai Khan; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway – all make appearances, some of them quite substantial, that echo through the rest of the poem. One of the pleasures of The Cantos is its cast of thousands.

But as the poem becomes increasingly omnivorous, devouring and digesting history, culture, and experience in service of Pound’s grand vision, something begins to happen. A rupture appears in his thought, eventually widening into a gaping crevasse that would swallow up Pound, his Cantos, and his legacy.

The rupture was usury. The crevasse was Italian Fascism.

Pound the Monster

Pound giving a Fascist salute upon his final return to Italy, 1958.

The standard line about Modernist experimentation is that it developed in response to the devastation of World War I. That was certainly the case for Pound, who had many friends injured or killed in the trenches – though to him, the losses weren’t just personal. They were losses to humanity and culture; the Great War was as much an affront to art as it was to life. Pound resolved to understand how it had happened so he could help ensure it never happened again.

This obsession led him to begin studying economics and politics. By the time he completed the first volume of cantos, he’d already identified what he believed to be the malevolent force behind the great war. This force would become the engine of his political thought: usura.

That is, usury: financial capital not put to use in service of the people. Pound was an acolyte of the heterodox economists C. H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell, and, from reading them, he came to believe that the natural order demanded that capital be put to use in service of social good. Usury was an affront to that. The definition provided in The Cantos dramatizes its criminality a bit more vividly: “A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production.” So far, so good.

Critiques of capital don’t necessarily morph into paranoia about “international finance,” or to anti-Semitism.³ But they did in Pound’s case. He was attracted to Fascism early on, and became intensely psychologically attached to Mussolini, especially after they briefly met in 1932. The more invested Pound became, the deeper he sank into the bizarre, anti-Semitic morass of official Fascist ideology. By the time a second World War did break out, Pound’s initial pacifist impulses had functionally disappeared, dissolved in a vat of hatred and paranoia.

Pound’s notorious pro-Axis wartime broadcasts demonstrate the full derangement of his mental state. Intended to counter Allied messaging, the broadcasts showcase his commitment to Fascism at its most total; as such, they’ve long been a thorn in the side of Pound apologists. Too significant to ignore, too blatant to excuse, they state directly and plainly what can often be overlooked in the poetry: his conspiracies, his hero-worship of Mussolini, his anti-Semitism. A brief representative example:

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the bunyah [merchant caste of India], you stand for NOTHING but usury.

Pound made hundreds of speeches filled with this ugly stuff, and they were hardly the only form his activism took. He was heavily involved in Fascist cultural projects, creating staggering amounts of propaganda for both Fascist Italy and its short-lived successor, the Salò Republic. And the full extent of his involvement with the Mussolini regime is still being uncovered; much of it remains unexamined by scholars. The deeper one dives, the longer one looks, the more impossible it becomes to whitewash Pound’s moral and political crimes. There is no question that he embraced evil, dove headfirst into it. And yet.

Ideologues tend to make bad art. Ideology deadens the imagination; inflexible ideologies deaden it the most. But this isn’t always the case, and it isn’t the case with Pound. Perversely, some of his greatest artistic work was yet to come.

After the war, Pound was arrested by occupying Allied forces and kept imprisoned at the National Training Center in Pisa, a U.S. prison camp. They kept him in an outdoor cage that left him exposed to the elements, and, while there, he began work on his greatest poetic achievement. The Pisan Cantos, an astonishing meditation on culture and memory, brought the established style of The Cantos to its apex:

The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders

Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,

Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano

by the heels at Milano

That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock

DIOGONOS, Διγονσς, but the twice crucified

where in history will you find it?

yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,

with a bang not with a whimper,

To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the color of stars.

This sequence, the opening of Canto 74, represents Pound at the peak of his powers. It’s as rich in imagery, allusion, and experience as anything in the earlier cantos, but Pound’s vision, before still restless and incomplete, has matured. One can feel the rage and righteous indignation coursing through each line.

It’s a stunning passage – so stunning, in fact, that it’s tempting to elide the fact that it’s a lament for the defeat of Fascism. Benito Mussolini is cast as a Christ figure – “Ben” and his mistress “la Clara” were “twice crucified,” destroying the hope Pound once had in their twisted worldview. The allusion to Eliot’s (“the Possum”) “The Hollow Men” illustrates the stakes: the end of the world. Whatever else they show, The Pisan Cantos demonstrate how Fascist politics had become inextricable from Pound’s poetic vision. In any case, he was lucky to even complete them.

After his internment at Pisa, Pound was brought up on charges of treason. He avoided conviction (and execution) only by pleading insanity, and went on to spend the next 12 years in a state asylum. During that time, his poetry remained fused to Fascist ideology. Pound’s associations with the extreme Right continued well into the ‘50s, even as his reputation in literary circles was being rehabilitated, and references to the “lost paradise” of Fascism are peppered throughout subsequent volumes of The Cantos.

He appears to have been unapologetic about his political commitments, and despite anecdotal reports to the contrary, he never recanted his support of Fascism. Mussolini’s legacy remained a concern until the last “finished” canto, Canto 116:

To make Cosmos—

To achieve the possible—

Muss., wrecked for an error,

But the record

the palimpsest—

a little light

in great darkness—

cuniculi—

⁴

As with Canto 74, there’s a lot of rich beauty in Canto 116, and it’s possible – tempting, even – to read regret in it. I’ve done it. But, if there is regret, the canto suggests that it’s not for Pound’s own behavior, but another lament for the destruction of the Fascist project. What was once, in the poet’s mind, a body of work that promised to deliver the world from the usury that caused the Great War has been reduced to a cold, lifeless “record” – no longer capable of delivering change, only testifying to the “Paradise” that might have been. Whatever hope there is remains unrealized, waiting to be reassembled by some unknown, unprepared future generation. Pound even links Mussolini’s demolished “muccho di leggi” (or “mass of laws”) to his own unfinished Cantos. The moral and political chasm of Fascism remained open – in the poetry, and in Pound’s life. He stuck with his beliefs to the end.

Pound should have been executed. Instead, to quote the poet H.D., “He lay on the floor of the Iron Cage and wrote the Pisan Cantos.” The contradiction is startling in its sheer audacity – how dare Pound fashion his greatest work from the ruins of evil – and, to my mind, pretty damn compelling. It’s that Möbius strip again. Is there any way to separate the art from the artist, to enjoy and appreciate Pound’s work even with the understanding that he was, by any reasonable standard, a monster? And if there is, should it be done?

Pound the Paradox

Portrait of Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis, 1939.

I’ve wrestled – I keep wrestling – with the Pound Paradox. Historical and artistic significance aside, there are many obvious reasons to toss him on the ash-heap of history. If you want to let go, let go. Ignoring Ezra Pound won’t hurt anyone.

But I also think there are reasons to keep reading Pound, to keep thinking about him. One is an old-fashioned belief in the awesome power of art to transcend the circumstances of its making – history, politics, and everything else. Greatness is greatness, genius is genius, and by reading and studying great literature we gain the ability to conference with history’s most unique minds. It may be unfashionable, but I still see a lot of value in the idea.

But, of course, Pound’s writing poses a direct, significant challenge to those conceptions of literary study as apolitical and ahistorical. There’s no way to even read The Cantos, much less understand it, without a grasp of Pound and his personal, political, and artistic trajectory. By taking history and politics as major subjects, the poem explicitly invites political and historical readings.

To which I say: exactly. That tension, between art as an aesthetic experience and art as a product of a specific historical and political moment, is itself what makes Pound so interesting. By extension, studying his work can aid in the development of mental tools for dealing with the complexities – and atrocities – of what’s still too often called “Western” history. The paradox of Pound and the paradox of the West are one and the same.

The Cantos contains every reason to reject the idea of “the West” and every reason why we shouldn’t, inextricably intertwined. Moments of astonishing beauty, clairvoyance, and insight, sit side-by-side with open celebrations of Fascism and ugly anti-Semitism. To read Pound is to encounter the contradiction between how the West understands itself and how the West actually operates at its most acute, and to see how that contradiction – the Pound Paradox – can never be fully resolved.

It’s true that you can’t really “separate the artist from the art” – not fully, anyway, and certainly not with a work like The Cantos. But works of art do exist independently of their creators, and there’s value in the irresolvable contradiction. Since it can’t be evaded, it has to be confronted; since it now belongs to history, it can never be resolved.

Pound was brilliant. Pound was evil. Both of these things are true; to embrace either alone is to embrace half a lie. Ignore him if you like. But he and his record will always be there, lurking on dusty shelves in forgotten libraries, as much a part of history now as any of his subjects – Homer, Confucius, Jefferson, Adams, Eliot, Joyce, Mussolini – and waiting to be rediscovered. Reconstructed. Built up and destroyed all over again.

I never planned to study Ezra Pound. Now that I have, he’ll be with me for a while.

1. Substack limits my formatting options, so many of the quotations from Pound’s work are slightly botched. Where appropriate, I’ve included links to the full poems.

2. For readers interested in diving deeper, there are many great resources available, such as the Ezra Pound Society’s Cantos Project.

3. Notably, reflexive anti-Semitism was considered normal at the time even in Left-leaning publications, such as the New Age, which Pound read and to which he contributed.

4. The quoted text is from the New Directions edition of the Cantos, which differs slightly from the linked Paris Review version.