Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

So why am I still conflicted about Pound? I think it’s obvious. He wasn’t only a
fascist-far more than that-& only a relatively small proportion of his poetry is
fascist. (Of course this sounds like "she’s only a leetle bit pregnant.") But could
it be that what Pound told Allen Ginsberg when Allen visited him in Venicethat
it was "a stupid suburban prejudice!"-was really what he thought it was?
Could that have led to his supporting Mussolini & even Hitler?
I think Major Douglas & his Social Credit (a version of money reform that was
dripping with anti-Semitism-not all money reformers are anti-Semites-had as
much to do with it as Pound’s moving to Italy. (He met Douglas before leaving
London.) However, the whole concatenation of Western "populism", the Silver
Movement, &c., which was part of his background as a Westerner, born in
Idaho, had as much to do with Pound’s turn toward fascism. (Ez had all too
much in common with Pat Buchanan! (Curiously, there were even hints of
Pound’s interest in Bolshevism around the time of An Objectivist Anthology!)
The fact is that Pound could be a fascist & also write wonderful poetry-even
after turning into a fascist! People are not integral. Certainly Pound wasn’t. (I
certainly have never been.). One is a different person at different times. What I
referred to in the "Afterword" to Words nd Ends from Ez-much to my surpriseas
"the spirit of Ezra Pound" (I’ve avoided using the word "spirit"as long as I
can remember) was not that of a fascist. Tho he may have thought that he was
writing a populist-reformist anticapitalist-fascist montage when he was writing
The Cantos, it turned out to be a collage poem such as few poets, if any, had
written before. (Thanks, Charles, for pointing this out, despite the fact that you
hate Pound much more than I ever have.) It certainly doesn’t "all cohere!"
E.g., Roy Campbell, a fine poet who fought on the Franco side in Spain-as a
monarchist rather than a fascist-wrote not only excellent poems of his own (tho
some seem as fascist as Pound’s) but also good translations of Baudelaire & St.
John of the Cross, & in 1952 he published an important study & translation of
Lorca.
When I wrote Words nd Ends from Ez in the early 1980s, I was fully aware of
Pound’s fascism & anti-Semitism, but I still found much of his poetry
inspiring. I think many of us-especially my younger, language-poet friendslearned
very much from Pound. The whole process of juxtaposing disparate
elements within the space (in all senses) of a poem was given to us primarily by
Pound & his bÍte noir Stein! (How Ez’d gnash his teeth at that sentence!)
I think the contributions of the Dadaists & Surrealists to this kind of poemconstruction
were minor compared to those of Pound.