Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

Yet Pound’s poetry is never simply a direct reflection of his politics; indeed, I
would argue quite to the contrary that Pound’s work contradicts his fascism.
The fascist reading of Pound’s poetic practice is valuable as one approach; it is
not a final or definitive reading; as with all critical methods, it illuminates some
issues while obscuring others. Of course, as Casillo’s book and other Pound
criticism shows, it also may push the criticism to the polemical and even
hysterical, as if the critic feels she or he is wrestling with a demon more than
interpreting a poem. This too needs to be historicized and contextualized before
it can be judged.
Pound told Allen Ginsberg he suffered from "that stupid, suburban prejudice of
antisemiticm", as if he should have been immune from such a low, "suburban"
consciousness. But one thing that is notable about Pound is that he does not
appear to have been "personally" antisemitic, which would have been in no way
unusual for a person of his generation and background. His attacks on Jews are
not related to his hatred of individual Jews or his desire to be a member of an
"exclusive" country club. His views of Jews are highly theoretical and
structural, projecting Jewishness, more than individual Jews, as the core force
in the destruction of the most cherished values of the West. This demonization
is not a "stupid suburban prejudice", it is the systematic paranoia-producing
ideology that has come to be called by the fascism. (Burton Hatlen: "we will all
seriously misundertand fascism if we insist on seeing it as a "right-wing"
poltical movement. For fascsim … blended an authoritarianism ususally
associated with the ‘right’ and a ‘populism’ ususally characteristic of the
‘left’.") Marjorie Perloff is quite right to point to it in Buchanan and the
fundamentalist right; they too have gone well beyond "stupid suburban
prejudice", even as they bank on it. It is scary to see the degree to which fascist
ideas have rooted themselves so deeply in mainstream American life, often in
the guise of family values and consonance with a natural order. Pound’s most
fascist polemics resonate in an eery way with the current wave of attacks on the
arts, gays, the disenfranchised poor, immigrants, feminism, and the cities. I say
this because there is often a tendency among Americans to exoticize fascism;
Pound did his best to bring it home.
There are any number of fascist writers who are of virtually no interest to many
or probably any of us on this list. And there are virulent antisemites like Celine,
whose work I like more than is comfortable to say, but which I don’t find as
structurally and "tropically" rich in terms of the sort of issues I am raising here.
Pound’s work, it seems to me, not only allows for but provokes an ideological
reading; it insists that it be read, form and content, for its politics and its ideas.