Ezra Pound and the Marxist Temptation

Abstract

the Bollingen Award for poetry to Ezra Pound, has there been much interest in the political ideas of this powerful, odd, original and estranged man. The ravages of time have proceeded, in the last twenty years, to make their mark deep on him. Academic publishing has sectioned off bits and pieces of his poetry to be subjected to formal explication; his Cantos have been chipped down to suitable teaching size. Popular literary history is by now conditioned to glorify him as the individual who once made some spectacularly intelligent editorial suggestions about The Waste Land. As for his verse techniques, they survive, one hears, but in poets none of whom would admit to having followed the general model of Ezra Pound. About his economic ideas (ideas which he has pursued since 1920), funny-money has proved a kind enough designation; as for his politics, fascist is one of the generally accepted terms. Of course, the state of affairs in 1948-49 wasn't much better. The Bollingen Award occasioned a most bitter cause cclebre in established literary society in this country; tensions were brought to the breaking point between two groups who otherwise shared ignorance about most of the things Pound had been up to, in his literary and social thinking, for most of his life. One group, seeking to defend the award, derived its strength from the principles of New Criticism, aesthetic freedom, polite pedagogy and liberalism; the other, represented by Robert Hillyer in the Saturday Review, utilized more self-conscious principles of political engagement, but did so that it might attack Pound as a traitor, a supporter of Mussolini and an anti-Semite. The Marxist Left, already on record for having suggested in The New Masses (Dec. 11 and 25, 1945) that Pound be executed for treason, took no important part in this controversy. The fight was rather between that kind of liberalism which regarded the issue as one of free speech, and