Poet Ezra Pound, an American
Giant
By Tom White
Idaho-born writer Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) delved into the poetry of
the West with fantastic energy and intensity from his school days on.
He studied for
two years as a “special student” at the
University of Pennsylvania, starting when he was only
fifteen years old, then went on to Hamilton College in New York State, where
he took his bachelor’s degree. He then returned to the University of
Pennsylvania, receiving his Master of Arts degree in
Romance
philology in 1906.
After
an initial college teaching job in Indiana that he lost in less than a year,
I think he never again held a “9 to 5” job of any kind. He moved to England
in 1908, He was from then on focused on poets and poetry that “added
something new,” first, to the European poetic canon, and then to world
poetry. His learning over seven decades is encapsulated in his great work,
The Cantos, meant as a guide
drawn from the human past “to teach, move, and delight” his contemporary and
future readers (ut doceat, ut moveat, ut
delectet in a famous medieval formulation).
His studies in ancient Greek, Latin, and Provencal poetry and in Anglo-Saxon
verse, 19th century French literature, Chinese poetry, Confucian
learning, and so on, which have proved so fascinating to scholars all over
the world, have tended to somewhat obscure the fact of his unflagging
interest in that magic 1,000 years between c. 410 A.D. and c. 1410 A.D., the
period that Culture Wars editor and publisher, E. Michael Jones, has called
the millennium of the “Rule of Christ,” and which post-Enlightenment writers
denigrate as the “Dark Ages.” It was in this
period, and in the Christian Mediterranean culture, that Pound found the
arts and intellectual traditions that were most congenial to him.
It was in this stretch of time and culture that Pound found the Provencal
poets and the later Italian poets, Cavalcanti and Dante, who were for him
high water marks of genuine poetic art and true culture. And in this same
period he found the Christian philosophical stress on (economic) justice for
all, which led him to reject the whole post-Calvin usurious society of the
last 500 years and adopt the uncompromising view of Aristotle and Thomas
Aquinas that usury, the taking of interest on money, is theft, sin, a
monstrous evil that over time will destroy society and life itself.
I don’t know of any reference to Thomas Aquinas in Pound; he perhaps never
read all, or even much of, Thomas’s
Summa; but he was saturated in the cast of mind it summarized and
applied to the whole of Christian moral and spiritual life. Thomas’s taste
for philosophical abstractions was not Pound’s, but Thomas’s taste for
truth, order, and fair dealing was exactly his.
Pound’s position on usury, so opposed to the developed modern sense of
commerce and banking, is given in many places in his work, but most
monumentally in Canto XLV, I believe the longest poem on usury in the
language, and certainly the most mordant and beautiful treatment of this
gross evil and its effects on human life. I wish I could reproduce it here,
but better to send you to the text itself, which, after all, is the whole
purpose of this article.
"Sovereignty
rests in money. The United States Constitution is the greatest state
document yet written, because it alone of them all,
clearly recognizes this power and places it in the hands of congress. . . .
The basis of the state is its economic justice."
—Ezra Pound in Guide to Kulchur,
page 270
To write about Pound is to attack the proverbial mountain. He lived 87
years, published more than 60 books, and was involved in enough controversy
for any ten men, maybe any hundred or even thousand men. His major interests
or concerns were, above all, world poetry and, then, economic, social, and
political theory and practice, especially the age-old scourge of usury. He
viewed our present money system as radically evil, and destructive of
economic and social justice.
Taking on the world the way Pound did is a tall order, you will agree. But
Pound always kept his view, his angle of approach, personal: what has this
or that individual writer written; what has this or that particular
financier or politician done, what, indeed, was he, Pound, doing, what
impact was he having on his friends? Until very close to the end of his
life, Pound had a touching faith in his ability to persuade others of the
truth of what he believed—he knew—to be true. Why, all you have to do—is it
not?—is set out the true facts in a case, present them well (Pound knew how
to do that), and surely no one can deny the point of them? Of course, people
in droves can deny the truth. Pound also knew that perfectly well; he was no
naïf; but he chose never to give up.
This approach worked astonishingly well when he was trying in friendship to
show other writers, and even other kinds of artists—sculptors and
musicians—what he had learned and what they might learn from him. As Eustace
Mullins, a biographer of Pound, has pointed out, there were four men, all
Pound’s friends, who won Nobel Prizes and whose
writing Pound heavily influenced, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway. Pound
himself, of course, never got the prize.
I particularly like to recall something James Joyce said about Pound, who
was instrumental in getting Ulysses
published and getting Joyce money to live on when he needed it most: “We all
owe him much. I most of all.” Such encomiums of
Pound—Eliot called him the “better maker” in his dedication of “The
Wastelands” to Pound—were offered up in profusion by people he called
friends. Pound heavily blue-penciled “the Wastelands, into the final version
the world now knows as the most famous long poem in English of the last
century. The “power people,” on the other hand, hated him and his work and
still do.
Antisemitism
I should have liked to begin this overview by talking of Pound’s massive
contributions to world poetry. And I definitely wanted to discuss his work
on usury (defined simply as the taking of interest on money loans) and his
sense of the urgent need for local and non-usurious money. But I think it is
not yet possible to begin an introduction to Pound by climbing either of
those slopes on the mountain.
Instead, I believe we simply have to deal first, after some fashion, with
the whole question of Pound’s “antisemitism” (I prefer this simpler spelling
to the standard “anti-Semitism”); because the charge against him that he was
a vicious antisemite refuses to die—and refuses, too, to become any sort of
minor note in his biography. Probably nothing that I can do will help it to
die. The accusation of antisemitism turns up over and over again; it gets
into every discussion of him or his work. It is the standout sub-theme of
his biography on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound); a
document worth reading despite that, since much of what it covers will not
be dealt with here.
I recall standing in the lobby of a hall at the intermission of a symphony
concert a couple of years ago talking to several people I knew, including an
assistant professor of English at our local university (not incidentally,
she was Jewish). We were talking about something having to do with writing
or reading, and I sensed a chance to insert a test question that I
occasionally use in talks about such matters. I find it a way to get a quick
reading on where someone fits along a sort of a spectrum of sophistication
in modern letters. I asked, “What do you think of Ezra Pound?” “He’s crazy,”
she snapped back. A lot said in two words: since Pound was long dead, this
was not so much an opinion of his character but of his work, all of it.
“Crazy.” I let the subject drop. Not the place for a harangue. And I knew it
would be that or nothing.
About all I can expect is to persuade a few people, willing to bother with a
“poet” at all, that this poet was a giant among men. The accusation that he
was a Jew-hater is, I believe, simply not true. It is a total canard. What
is true is that he said some
very unpleasant things about “bankers,” while emphasizing that many, if not
all, of the biggest of them were Jews, about whom, in the context of their
being “Big Jews,” he also said some harsh things. Pound, who was dedicated
to clarity of communication if to anything, used vivid (that’s an
understatement) terms to speak and write. A quote from one of his early
1940’s broadcasts from Rome is in the Wikipedia article (page 4):
The big Jew is
so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that
omelet. It would be better for you to retire to Derbyshire and defy New
Jerusalem, better for you to retire to Gloucester and find one spot that is
England than to go on fighting for Jewry and ignoring the process. . . . You
let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire,
and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. . . . And the big Jew has rotted EVERY
nation he has wormed into.”
An aside: as a writer I admire the way E. Michael Jones, publisher of this
magazine, eschews precisely the kind of “bad language” that Pound employed
in his attacks on the usurers over the radio from Rome, and in print in a
lot of places when he was writing about economic crime and folly.
I do not presume to dictate “literary manners and morals” for anybody; nor
would I presume to chide or rewrite Pound. But for myself, I think the day
for scurrilous personal attacks on any enemy has gone by. To do that is
precisely to copy “the Jews” in their accusations of antisemitism. The
Christian rule, as I understand it, is always to blast the crime with
maximum decibels, but love the criminal and seek his reform. A tough dictum,
but it is also dominical, and I have (I hope) given over improving on the
Lord.
As things stand now, the endless repetition of “Pound is an antisemite”
serves principally to assassinate his reputation as America’s most
astonishing, rewarding, and influential 20th century poet. It
serves, as well, to obscure and fend off facing the real point at issue: was
he right or wrong that usury was a civilization-wrecking, nation-wrecking
practice? And was he right or wrong that the use of usury to exploit and
ultimately destroy nations and civilizations was an ancient Jewish practice,
done in plain defiance of the prohibition against usury in the Torah, with
an end in view, finally, of the rule of the whole world, by means of usury,
by the “Big Jews.” (In all of this discussion, I am assuming that most Jews,
like most of everybody else, are pawns and serfs of the Money Masters—the
superbankers.)
Pound was clearly saying that indeed there was a “conspiracy” of the few to
steal the wealth of all. Well, is it true or not? That’s the only question
in this whole money matter that is worth discussing.
The Usury
Gimmick
Pound’s writings on usury amounted to a direct attack on the central
mechanism, the “primary gimmick,” that “the Jews”—again, the “Big Jews,” the
ones who “organize” and have the superbig money—have used to fund, isolate,
and advance their tribe in the world for a very long time. (Some would say
since the Babylonian Captivity or even before that; Canadian David Astle, in
an extraordinary study of the sources, nature, and relationships of
currencies from antiquity to the present says just that in his
Babylonian Woe: A Study of the Origin of
Certain Banking Practices and of their effect on the events of Ancient
History, written in the light of the Present Day (A private
edition published in 1975 by the author and printed by Harmony Printing Ltd,
Toronto).
And as Kevin MacDonald has shown in a number of scholarly volumes, the one
thing Jews have done historically above all others is maintaining themselves
as a separate people. They do it today, even while many phalanxes of Jews
also establish themselves as citizens of many other nations. They have done
this notably in the U.S in the last 150 years as they had done in the two
preceding centuries in Northern Europe. Their mode of operating, again above
all, includes arranging, with remarkable skill, brilliance, and
effectiveness, that wherever they gain power and wealth, everything that
goes forward is, as much as they can manage and that is usually very much,
“good for the Jews.”
The foregoing sentences would be certain to earn me a place among the
ever-burgeoning number of “antisemites” on the character-assassination
attack list, if I were anybody of consequence. It’s even a badge of honor to
be so designated—“up to a point,” as Evelyn Waugh has one of his characters
in one of his novels say when trying to gently disagree with his egomaniacal
boss, without exactly disagreeing with him.
The “Swarm”
When the word goes out that so-and so is “bad-for-the-Jews” the “swarm” goes
into action. What is the swarm? Let us borrow Israel Adam Shamir’s language
here. Shamir is a Russian native, an ex-Jew, now an Orthodox Christian, and
a resident of Jaffa in Israel, a state he believes should be one nation,
with a one-man, one-vote system, and with right of return for all
Palestinians. (The
present writer discussed him and reviewed one of his books in an article,
Pardes: A Study
in Cabbala, in the Sept. 2005 issue of Culture Wars):
After [U.S. ex-President] Carter spoke [making the point that Israel is an
“apartheid state”], he was immediately counter-attacked by organized
Jewry—you couldn't miss it! In my native Siberia, in its short and furious
summer, you can watch a swarm of gnats attack a horse, each small
bloodsucker eager for his piece of the action. After a while, the blinded
and infuriated animal rushes headlong in a mad sprint and soon finds its
death in the bottomless moors. The Jews developed the same style of attack.
It is never a single voice arguing the case, but always a mass attack from
the left and the right, from below and above, until the attacked one is
beaten and broken and crawls away in disgrace.
Each attacker is as tiny and irrelevant as a single gnat, but as a swarm
they are formidable. Observe them separately: Dershowitz, an advocate of
torture and of hostage killing, an
apprehended
plagiarist who never was elected to any
position of authority and commands no respect, demands to debate the
president. It is indeed beyond chutzpah; but Dershowitz is supported by
other Jews in prime positions and his ridiculous demand is seconded by both
university and media until this thieving nonentity gets equal time on a TV
channel to present “his case”. Another gnat is a
Deborah Lipstadt, a nonentity brought
forth by the Washington Post.
Plenty of others are even smaller than these two, for instance 14 Jews who
gave up their positions at Carter Center. If they were not able to keep the
media in their hands, they wouldn't be heard by anyone but their spouses.
Their
technique is quite simple: They switch the focus of argument onto the
personality of their adversary. Thus, instead of discussing apartheid in
Israel, we discuss Jimmy Carter, whether he is a bigot and antisemite (thus
Foxman, the “bad Jew”) or he is not (Avnery, the “good Jew”). The correct
answer is “irrelevant”: Carter’s love for Jews
or lack of it has no bearing on the question of apartheid in Palestine.
Likewise, if we discuss the situation in Bosnia or Kosovo, we do not go into
our sentiments towards Serbs, Albanians or Croats. But Jews are different!
For
instance,
General Wesley Clark said that rich Jews, the great donors of Washington
politicians, push for war with Iran. Well, this can be discussed, maybe even
denied, but instead they derail the discussion into another topic, whether
Clark is an antisemite . . .
From this moment, Clark will stick to defending himself, and the guys will
take care that his hands will be full. Here again, the correct answer is a
polite shrug: who cares whether Clark is a bigot? Maybe he is also a
paedophile and usurer, but this ad
hominem has no bearing on what he said. And an accusation, “You
do not love Jews” is not much different from “You do not love your aunt”,
and you probably have learned to live with it at the age of six.
(From http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng9.htm)
The charge of antisemitism has dogged Pound since he began to study “the
economic causes of warfare” immediately after World War I. But I here
submit, as Shamir suggests, that the charge of antisemitism against Pound is
supremely irrelevant.
Control of
Media
One of the principal Jewish tactics directed to making themselves “Masters
of Discourse” (Shamir’s term), has been to buy up the “major media” and so
control what and how events or news are disclosed to the public. The fact of
that in America is now common knowledge and is even bragged about by various
Jewish writers.
The recent
“outing” of AIPAC, the America-Israel Political Action Committee by
Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, not to mention the extraordinary work of
the publisher/editor of this periodical, has pushed along an emerging
freedom from “fear of the Jews,” but it has so far progressed only a little,
because “fear of the Jews” is no joke in politics or writing or teaching
(especially at the university level). Ask Joseph Sobran, whose career as
perhaps the most intelligent and articulate American-Catholic commentator on
our politics was derailed by his mild but very public criticism of the Jews.
Pat Buchanan has survived, but only after a fashion, after similar
“indiscretions.” Neither man has any chance of great influence anymore. The
list of people who have disadvantaged themselves in this way could be much
enlarged. The latest addition to it is of course ex-president Carter.
Incarcerated nearly 13 years
Ezra Pound was a virtually archetypical case of this same Jewish attack on
free speech that was, from their point of view, radically too free. He paid
for it. Initially charged with treason, he spent 12-1/2 years (1946 to 1958)
in St. Elizabeths federal mental hospital under a
diagnosis of insanity made by a panel of psychiatrists who examined him in
1946. It seems obvious that the psychiatrists involved thought it not a good
idea to let the nation’s major poet be tried for treason; the insanity
finding seemed a way out of the dilemma.
That diagnosis denied Pound a trial on the charge of treason against him, a
trial Pound plainly wanted since he believed he could rebut it. However, the
“nuts” designation effectively kept him in prison-hospital all those years.
No one with any sense ever thought Pound was “insane.” The work he did in
the prison camp in Pisa and in St. Elizabeths precludes that. On the other
hand he was radically stressed by the trouble he brought on himself and
surely had some very bad days.
The major media largely kept up the attack on him as a traitor while he was
in prison, until at the last, important articles in Life and Time Magazines,
then owned and edited by Henry Luce, initiated a “let him go” attitude.
Pound would accept release only on condition all charges against him
were dropped. In order to let the government get
rid of this hot potato, the government agreed. The charges were dropped, and
he was released—to return to Italy, where, in Venice, he died and was
buried.
The bald external facts of Pound’s fateful years in Italy until he was flown
back to the United States in military custody would seem to a superficial
observer to be prima facie evidence of the validity of the U.S. government’s
case against him. He had been living in Italy seventeen years when the U.S.
entered Word War II. He tried to book passage home for himself and family
members but for complicated reasons was not able to do so. He had opposed
the war from the start, and opposed it to the end. In 1943 he asked the
Mussolini government for permission to go on Rome Radio—and was granted
it—to present his anti-war case, in English (often in a kind of
cracker-barrel jargon of his own). He directed his broadcasts to the Allied
governments and their troops as they approached ever nearer.
He was harshly
critical of President Roosevelt and made anti-Jewish points repeatedly. The
broadcasts were often enough difficult to understand; they very likely were
never heard by many, or perhaps even any, people in the U.S. Pound’s central
theme was that the U.S. was serving the Jewish/British/American world-wide
banking cabal by attacking and destroying Europe, an idea he had developed,
defended, and extensively explicated from the 1920s on. Just after WW I he
wrote that he had begun a systematic study of the “economic causes of
warfare.”
The conclusion
he came to was that the “bankers” and their universal usury were chiefly at
fault, not just for wars, but for the general economic malaise of Western
societies that had prevailed, really, since the close of the Christian
medieval, anti-usury era, at just about the same time as the early 16th
century “Reformation” occurred, and John Calvin declared that business men
should be permitted to charge interest on money loans, something the Roman
Church had opposed all during the previous millennium, as E. Michael Jones’s
articles on the Revolutionary Jew make clear.
World War I,
and the death of so many of his artist and poet friends in it, had both
deeply saddened and challenged, even enraged, Pound. He had already
demonstrated before he left England for France that he was a dynamic,
brilliant poet and scholar, who was working on nothing less than making a
revolution in the whole nature and course of poetic expression in the modern
era. He worked at that as hard as a good scientific researcher works. He
became from that time on, while remaining a dedicated poet, also a
devastating and relentless critic of the murderous policies of the
industrially advanced national governments of the Western world, which had
caused the needless deaths of millions of young men in the Great War of
1914-1918, the “war to end war,” a civilizational disaster repeated in WW
II:
“There died a myriad,
And of the best among them,”
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
—“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” 1920
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1919) and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” were the
two major poems that closed out his fourteen years’ residency in England
(1908-1922). He moved to Paris in 1922 and never again lived in England.
After that, his major poetic effort went into his
Cantos, a work it is hard not to
see as his response to the challenge of Whitman’s great
Leaves of Grass. Both were
accumulations of verse over many years, massive “works in progress” that
took most of their authors’ poetic energies until the near approach of
death. The works were comparable in those ways, although utterly different
in form and content. Initially, Pound, who, in his youth tended to like
rather allusive and esoteric forms and themes, disliked Whitman’s democratic
“yawp” and sprawl. As Pound matured, though, he
wrote:
“I make a pact
with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough. . . .
We have one sap and one root--
Let there be commerce between us.
Joined now in
death, it is plain that Pound and Whitman are “the two great American
poets.”
As I come
toward the close of this essay, the text of a speech on U.S. foreign policy
and civil liberties by Justin Raimondo has just come to hand. It appeared
June 4 on the website antiwar.com, which Raimondo directs. In it Raimondo,
who strenuously opposes Israeli influence in U.S. foreign policy and
internal politics, manages a very curious distinction. He speaks against
AIPAC, against the neoconservative (largely Jewish) party in Washington, and
in favor of Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, whose famous “taboo-busting”
study, The Israeli Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy, has made such a stir, and of course been attacked
by “the Swarm.” Then Raimondo makes the (to me) astonishing statement,
without supporting reference, that the views of the Israeli Lobby and those
of “most American Jews are poles apart.”
I am unaware
of any study or poll proving such a point or of any Jewish organization
expressing it. I am aware of many individual Jews who oppose the Lobby and
even Zionism, but a financed, organized, and well-publicized group doing so?
I don’t think so. I believe the burden of lifting the banker-usury yoke from
the shoulders of mankind is destined, as Shamir has suggested, to be borne
by Jews; but the hour seems not yet, because a complete change of heart
among “the Jews” is obviously a prerequisite.
What, then,
are we to do? Just now very little. We are
forbidden hatred and violence by the Lord. Anyway there is very little
indeed that can be done against the entrenched power of the statist
institutions that now stand against any alteration in the status quo of our
usurious, banker-ruled society. Christ’s demonstration on Calvary is our
model. Not a hand is to be raised against “the Jews,” as the popes have
repeatedly said across the centuries. But we have also been told by the Lord
Christ that we are to be wise as serpents. Nonviolence and wisdom are the
only tools we have for this battle. I submit that Pound offered much wisdom
about money and the evil of usury; in fact he cast his whole life and
work into the balance to make that wisdom known
to as many of his countrymen as possible. In an echo of a famous little poem
by Walter Savage Landor, he wrote in an ironic epitaph for himself. “I
strove with all, for ALL were worth my strife. . . .”
The Pound
canon is now enormous; any halfway decent library will have quite a few
titles by or relating to Pound. He said himself the clue can be got in an
afternoon; I found that so in 1950 sitting in a library in Cambridge, Mass.
an afternoon that I have never forgotten.