Climbing the Alps: The Vision of Ezra Pound

By Adam Sedia

Published in New Lyre - Winter 2021

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) remains a controversial figure, an easy target to dismiss. An American expatriate settled in Italy, he became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, going so far as to broadcast radio commentaries in support of the fascist regime. (“Ezra Pound.”) Often, this is dismissed as a quirk, but the controversy surrounding him is easy to understand upon reading the transcripts of his broadcasts. Pound broadcasted statements like these in English while the United States was at war with Germany and Italy: 

And the pathological brainstorm in the White House after years of robbing the country dipping into the Treasury, years of frothing at the mouth about Mussolini and Hitler, in mid-January comes out with a discourse and EVERY single item in it that has a trace of sanity is IMITATED from Mussolini or Hitler. 

Well, maybe. I was behindhand in readin’ Mein Kampf, but do you YET know what is IN it? Have you a clear idea of the PROGRAM? Hitler in 1924 saying that Germany ought to lay off the Tyrol, ought to SEE Italy. See Italy Fascist as the ONE ray of light in a world that was going to sunset, sinking. Just as I saw it as the ONE inch of SOLID basis. Well, Brother Adolf did do something about it, while I was lookin’ and listenin’. An' I hand it to him that he is more efficient than I am. 

And every sane act you commit is committed in HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler. Every reform, every lurch toward the just price, toward the control of the market is an act of HOMAGE to Mussolini and Hitler 

(Pound, Radio Speeches, pp. 31, 78, 82.) 

This is the preaching of a committed fascist, not a mere artist manipulated as a “useful idiot.” Indeed, Pound famously spent time in a military prison for his broadcasts, yet he remained unapologetic about his support even after Mussolini’s defeat. (“Ezra Pound.”)  

Still, his influence on twentieth-century poetry was indisputably profound, and his series of Cantos is considered the “signal modernist epic.” (Id.) The consensus view of Pound, it seems, is that he was a great poet with bad ideas. But, this turns out, is an ideological approach, one that adheres to the modernist orthodoxy while at the same time rejecting Pound’s discredited political views. Instead, an examination of Pound’s poetics that rejects the assumptions of modernism and rather turns a critical eye towards his modernist aesthetic reveals exactly the opposite. 

Pound nurtured a deep desire to improve society through cultural development, and an overriding interest in grafting Chinese and East Asian history, culture, and philosophy onto the Western heritage as a means to achieve that end. He saw Chinese and Japanese history, philosophy, and literature not as exotic or barbarian, but as companion to the Western cultural heritage. This demonstrates exactly the opposite of the racism imputed to him by his association with the fascist Italian government. They are ideas worth reconsidering in our own time, for the problems Pound sought to cure through them have only progressed to a nearly terminal stage in the years since his death. 

Where Pound fails, however, is in his poetics. His adoption of cubist presentation of imagery far exceeds anything T.S. Eliot ever attempts, resulting in an all but unreadable mish-mosh of images, languages, and symbols. Rather than being a good poet with bad ideas, it turns out that Pound was a bad poet with good ideas. 

I. 

In a previous essay called “Clarity and Obscurity: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared,” we have detailed Pound’s Imagist manifesto and the poetic techniques he espoused in it. But after Imagism, Pound became one of the main exponents of a short-lived artistic movement called Vorticism. Flourishing in the years immediately before World War I and led by the British painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (later a devoted admirer of Hitler), Vorticism “sought to capture the mechanical dynamism of its age as well as the stillness at its core,” emphasizing movement and stillness in both visual and literary arts. (Introduction to “Vortex”.) One means of achieving this effect in literature was through typographical inventiveness. (Id.) 

In a 1914 essay published in Lewis’s journal, BLAST, Pound articulates his conception of Vorticism in a series of short, direct assertions: 

  The vortex is the point of maximum energy. 

. . . 

  You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions. 
  OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting. 

(Pound, “Vortex.”) Pound the Vorticist saw man as an active agent, not a mere passive recipient of senses. And he took this idea further, seeing man as the active force shaping his own and the world’s future: 

All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,  
                                    NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE. 
         The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW. 
         . . . POPULAR BELIEFS, movements, etc., are the CORPSES OF VORTICES. . . . 

(Id.) Overzealous use of the “caps lock” key was a hallmark of Pound’s style, including in his poetry, with Vorticism’s emphasis on action manifesting in frequent outbursts of emphasis captured by entirely capitalized words. The aggressive tone it imparts is highly intentional. 

Also, the reference to “race” and “race-memory” might sound uncomfortable to contemporary ears, befitting the stereotype of a fascist. But such dismissiveness ignores what Pound actually writes. Leaving aside that “race-memory” in 1914 was avant-garde in a world that had yet to experience the horrors of Nazi genocide, Pound’s idea of “race-memory” is not confined to any one race. Indeed, Pound espouses just the opposite: “all the past that is capable of living into the future,” he says, is in his conceptual vortex.  

Pound, it should not be forgotten, won acclaim for his collection of translations of Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915). From the Westerner who so enthusiastically presented East Asian poetry into his own culture, a reader may safely take his words to mean that he indeed intends to include all history – the best from the heritage of all nations fused to build a unified vision of the future. 

Vorticism itself was not so successful. It ultimately dissolved in the upheavals of World War I, but Pound developed its ideas further, culminating in his 1938 book, Guide to Kulchur – with “culture” misspelled in a characteristically Poundian jab at bourgeois philistinism. Nowhere does Pound more clearly articulate his worldview than in this lengthy, sometimes rambling work that touches on history, art, philosophy, and society. In his preface to the 1970 edition of the work, Pound describes its purpose as a “mousing around for a significance in the chaos,” amid a “struggle . . . to preserve some of the values that make life worth living.” (Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 8.) That end – making life worth living – should always be kept in sight in reading Pound’s expostulations. 

Significantly, Pound begins with Confucius and a summary of The Analects. (Id., pp. 15-22.) He then discusses Greek philosophy first in contrast to Confucius: the latter “offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both,” whereas philosophy in the West became a “highbrow study, something cut off both from life and from wisdom,” which only Christianity supplied. (Id., pp. 23-24.) Confucius, in recommending familiarity with the ancient Chinese odes, was responsible in thinking “of the whole social order,” in contrast to the irresponsibility of the Greeks, whose “highbrow” discussion of abstract ideas bore no such considerations in mind. (Id., pp. 29-30.) Indeed, Confucius’s “insistence on the ODES lifts him above all occidental philosophers.” (Id., p. 127.) Confucianism in China led to order and reform; the ideas of Western philosophy produced totalitarianism. (Id., pp. 31-33.)  

Pound sees throughout Western history a conflict between order and authority on one hand and unchecked mercantilism on the other – the former represented by Roman law and the Catholic Church and the latter by classical Greek merchants and English capitalists. (Id., pp. 35-41, 46-49.) In Roman law, not Greek philosophy, Pound saw “the responsibility that carries wisdom into the details of action.” (Id., p. 40.)