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.