Ezra Pound and the Politics of Patronage

Abstract

EW writers, modern or otherwise, have inspired more criticism, and more of it theoretically polarized and mutually hostile, than Ezra Pound. The critic who would engage Pound's work finds himself or herself framed from the outset by a kind of critical Cold War, one which forces him into something resembling the role of Marc Antony at the funeral in Julius Caesar. Pound critics come time and again either to bury or to praise this strange and disturbing individual, who is seen by turns either as a fascist and anti-Semite in his very composition and genesis or as a literary genius whose true self (the self that produced the stalwart poetry of high modernism) can somehow be separated from the pathological embarrassment who penned and delivered the maniacal Rome Radio speeches.1 If I've just glanced synoptically at the theoretical oversimplification of this well-nigh proverbial condition of Pound studies, then let me be a bit clearer about its critically disabling consequences. A politically engaged criticism of Pound would by definition need to move beyond this kind of displacement of broad economic, social, and ideological problems onto Pound the unique (so it goes) and therefore romanticized subject of admiration or revulsion. It is here, at this juncture and against this pressing critical necessity, that the either-orist imperative of Pound studies exerts its institutionally powerful and politically disabling force. If we want to come to terms with the ideological character of Pound's cultural project, we need to explore what