‘With sword drawn as at Nemi
Day comes after day’
[Canto 77, p. 52]
‘Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower’
- Desolation Row, Bob Dylan
The last time I paid any serious attention to Ezra Pound was in 1999, when I made my first attempt to join the regular British Army. I was finishing my undergraduate studies, and felt ready to join the Army. On my application for officer selection to Westbury, I wrote how I read widely, particularly the work of Major C.H. Douglas, an economic theorist. I believed that Douglas’ having been a military officer, as well as an economist, would be a positive inducement for the Army to approve of my application. I knew about Major Douglas because I had been reading a long biography of Pound, and had just finished reading Pound’s Cantos, and Douglas had strongly influenced Pound’s attitude toward Italy and culture, with his political and economic theory. When he arrived in Italy, Pound began to commit himself and his time to trying to change the system of money which governed how the country carried out work and began supporting Benito Mussolini’s revolution.
In short, in 1999 I was reading poetry and studying Pound, and wanted to prove that this made me a good candidate for officer selection, so I had mentioned the major and Pound on my application, hoping that the Army would approve of me as I entered onto British Army officer training. Being selected was not a problem, I believed, since it was inevitable; but being liked or admired at the start, was important. This is typical of how a twenty-three year old sees the world, I suppose; I was destined to enjoy military life, and I wanted people to accept me and appreciate my general enthusiasm and intelligence, and my loyalty to the country and the Army; so I thought that mentioning my admiration for an old military officer would impress my new bosses. Westbury officer selection replied by letting me in the first door, then slamming all other shut; they allowed me to attend the selection week, but basically kicked me out as soon as they reasonably could at the end of it. I received the lowest possible grade, a Category 4, forbidding me make another application. I have always thought, that when the end of course address was given by the commanding officer, that he was speaking particularly to me when he said, that those few people with a Category 4 should not be downcast, because there were other occupations available, such as economics and banking.
In fairness to the Westbury staff, it is probable that they also took extreme exception to me and my application, because I had put on the application form, that I hoped to live for a few years in a place where there were no females. And it was surely because I put that in the application, that it was an Army female, a major in the Royal Signals, who personally awarded me the Category 4, in a sign of what a mistake I had made, when I had implied that the British Army was a masculine, or totally masculine organisation.
After that, I applied to join the Territorial Army in Wrexham, and served for ten years in the other ranks, and eventually became a sergeant, doing three tours of duty with the regulars. I basically worked with the regular army as much as I could, because for ten years, it was what I most wanted to do. It is only twenty-five years after being completely denied access to a permanent contract with the regular army, that the direction of travel which the British military was then taking, has become clear, insofar as we now know that the government did not really intend our Army to be a fighting force, and that British governments have not been very interested in keeping up a serious selection process at Westbury. We now see, that they do not consider England to be a country in its own right; and that therefore, a British armed forces is superfluous.
In his concluding address, the Commanding Officer at Westbury in summer 1999 had also said, that the British Army is like any other employer in Britain, and that it is separate from the rest of society, only in the same way as a firm of bankers, or a business selling groceries, is separate from society. He meant, I suppose, that the same kinds of standards apply to it, with respect to the equality of women and so on. It was like a business, he said, and had no higher dignity or purpose than that. I of course, was not impressed by this sentiment, or whatever it was he was doing. A nation has a terminal problem, when the profession of arms, the military organisation, is treated as if it were just an adjunct, a set of men without any essential loyalty: because what this mean is, the organised fighting men of a country must become a mere faction eventually – something which was implicit in what he said back then, but probably more obvious nowadays. How can the armed forces of a nation be a mere faction, an armed band contained inside the nation, without any loyalty to it, any higher transcendental meaning?
After the rejection, because of my mention of Pound, Douglas, and women soldiers, I was for some years mentally antagonised by my own country, because of its refusal to let me serve. The CO had said, that you don’t serve your country: you are employed by an organisation. You’re not employed by the nation, but by a firm. You have no higher purpose than to do a job, he said, since, he implied, the country does not intrinsically need protection at some higher semi-religious level, which is what I thought was the case.
This is a long anecdote which I provide so as to explain to myself why I have unconsciously avoided Ezra Pound for the past twenty-five years. It also demonstrates something about our country, the way in which the average middle and senior management authority viewed the country and service in 1999, and finally, how I myself viewed it. These things are relevant to the troubled life of that genius, Ezra Pound, and his works during a time of war; he is after all, one of our ‘war poets’, and devoted much of The Cantos to the war period. I speak for myself when I say that I’ve read his friends, Yeats, Joyce and Eliot continuously since 1999, but him not at all, even though they owed him a great deal, and though in some ways their work would have been more or less impossible without him, and he is of equal importance to them in our national literature.
It is a strange thing, that when we began to educate ourselves in poetry, and by means of poetry, as youths, we found ourselves referring back to Pound and Eliot for guidance on how to do it, deferring with absolute trust to our nearest teachers, who happened to be men born eighty or nineteen years before us. There have been no intervening critics and teachers of the same importance. Pound taught us to learn the ancient languages, and to read Homer and Sophocles, and anything in Latin, until such things were second nature, until they were our property. He taught us to read Dante, or forced us to want to read Dante, as the master craftsman. He made us beware of merely English language poetry, and showed that you must know more than the English tradition. He insisted on a revolution in English poetry and literature, a break with the past in order to become modern, and, to my generation, his instructions were still valid when we were young. That most of his work was translation from medieval Italian or French did not matter, since he was a teacher more than a poet. The little works he did do, such as ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, and ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’, stand out as a couple of works which he achieved; the thin spine of his Collected Poems (excluding the Cantos) only went to prove that he was very fussy about writing too much, which was a virtue.
I’m making a general account of who he was, and what his work was, in this essay. But because he is the most controversial of all the English-speaking poets of the last century, and the strangest poet of war and politics that we have, and especially because he was so embattled and contrary to the ‘West’; and because in this year ‘the West’ is again at war, it is necessary for me to also examine what our country is; I mean, what England is.
I intend to show, that Pound was a political writer in his later period, his ‘second period’ when he had left England and moved to Italy; and his work is interesting today more for his politics and his life, than for the pure poetry which he intended or ostensibly composed. By way of finishing my prefatory remarks, I emphasise, that his being a ‘personality’ and a writer of ‘political poetry’ is the reverse of what he wanted to achieve when he wrote The Cantos, which are meant to be a pure poetry, and a ‘sacramental’ work of art. They were not intended to be a vehicle for his own life, his ideas: they were meant to be purest song, the pure power of words to bring about something sacred. But on the contrary, The Cantos are a document of an individual man, expressing himself about politics, economics, and the culture which he wanted to see. They are another and twentieth century ‘Song of Myself’ in an era of tyrants, fascism, and the war between ‘despotism and freedom’, as the B.B.C would put it.
Pound had the kind of intellect which would see, in more than usual clarity, right to the centre of a matter, immediately. His mind saw to the heart of something, and his energies and attention, his love, very quickly revealed something’s deep implications. Without any restraint he typically communicated his insight to the appropriate people, and if necessary, told ‘the masses’; his skill with languages such as Chinese, his immediate and unswerving commitment to unknown men like Joyce, and his appropriation of ideas and theories of economics, are examples of this genius. But it was also typical of his mind, that in subsequent time, after the initial great explosion of understanding and expression, he would not get much deeper. A great initial yield of interesting work flowed from him, when he discovered something, and afterwards he either had to find something else, or get stuck in an unproductive rut with it for years, becoming more frustrated and cantankerous about it. Controversially, one of these discoveries was fascism in the form given it by Mussolini and Hitler, and Franco and Petain, and Stalin. This, alongside his discovery of half a dozen of the century’s finest poets.
I ought to have known the details of his life after 1922, as well as I know the details of the lives of his eminent contemporaries. But as I have explained, I unconsciously felt a bitter association between him with my personal failure in life, or the failure of my country, my armed forces, to accept or treat me properly. And I also felt a desire not to know about him because, after 1925, when he left England and went to live in Italy, he set off down the road of becoming a ‘traitor’. Of course, the biggest question about Ezra Pound is: how can we explain his treachery toward America and England, and why did he side with the Axis powers during the last war? I intend to answer that, or at least trouble the question. There is something wrong about even knowing what he was doing in the 1940s, because he was accused of treason, and was guilty. Here is someone who would have been sentenced to death, if he had not been found unfit to stand trial. Consciously, or unconsciously, we have considered that he did wrong, and since 1945, we have lived as if he had gone mad. For this reason, and others, I had no interest in what he was doing after he left England in the mid-1920s.
But now, when England and the West is clearly falling apart, we can go back and look at him and his reasons, perhaps, in the hope that there is something we missed about him, and on the off chance that he was right. Or, maybe, it is just a random accident that I myself turn back and repair a 25-year deficit. I am preparing the first edition of a magazine, and I am consulting my old masters, after all. But maybe Pound remains merely wrong, and he made a mistake in supporting the fascist leaders of the various nations of Europe during their crises, rather than the liberal democracies; that is what is universally said and believed. On the other hand, as I say, I have a grievance against my own country, which I have come to terms with, a military grievance, a misunderstanding between me and the class of people who have been running the armed forces and the government. And twenty-five years later, I find that my grievance with the state and the officer class was justified. It has taken those years to reveal the full extent of the failure and the treason, a treason of its own, which the country has suffered, which I myself suffered in an individual instance back in those days. What in 1999 was apparent only in some cases, such as mine, has these days become obvious, chronic, untreatable. Which is to say, perhaps Pound was right all along.
That sickness is perhaps what Pound was concerned with, a weakness, an economic sin, a political fault. I don’t know, but I want to investigate the whole nexus of the sickness, with the help of someone who perhaps knew more about culture and had more sense of what is good and bad for a country, than anyone else living in the middle of the last century. I must add that I have no intention here of trying to justify that statement: that he knew more about culture and country than anyone else then living; I merely assert it.
Here's where the worst happened to him: the arrest and the time on death row at a prison camp in Pisa, Italy. He was being held pending a trial for treason. But what is treason? I should draw attention to the philosophy which was expressed by the commanding officer at Westbury: he said, that life in Britain was a matter of individuals making choices of career, and that the army was made up of individuals. He was speaking on behalf of the Queen, and the government of Great Britain, when he said that there was no requirement for service to country per se, no obligation nor any demand for the blood and soil to become a man and serve in the armed forces. You can do what you like. It was a perfectly individual choice, whether or not to join an armed forces made up of individuals; and it was just as right, for a decision to be made that a man does not fit in, and does not have a place. On the other hand, my own idea was based on the notion, that a state can enforce conscription, and that an army is made up of the wealth and provisions of the human lives which it had given rise to. The nation is a higher thing than the individual. I should stress, I’m not here considering specifically the armed forces, the militarism, the martial aspect of life and men: rather, I’m considering the nation of what a country is, and what you owe to it, and whether belonging to it is a choice, a job, an occupation you can take or leave, something that can be taken away from you if you don’t fit in.
Again, at Westbury, where all officer careers begin in the British Army, they believed that the individual is, on the contrary, more important than the country. One should now ask, then how is treason even possible, when it is permitted to do what you like? Or how is impersonal service to the country possible? Or obedience, when such obedience is merely optional? I think that the crime of treason still exists, but as it were, is at the discretion of some person somewhere, when they chose to bring it to bear on an individual. What is lacking is, a sense of a culture and a country which demands, or forgives; that is what the Regular Army was lacking at the officer level back in 1999. But it was also lacking in 1940, when the nation of Italy (which Pound supported) was at war with the nation of England, which Pound claimed had ceased to be a nation.
Being an Army officer was a job, an economic input, an economic choice. I think that this sets the background for Pound’s quarrel with America and England. Like me, or like anyone with a historical sense, to hold the idea that the individual is over the nation is an obvious mistake. And it lies in this deeper root: England had ceased to consider itself a nation, and had become a source of profit making and financial dabbling, as far as the authorities were interested in it.
For perhaps 80 years, and more, the country has been run on this false premiss. Pound declared his anger with the British and American state openly, and took his annoyance so far as to commit treason, and side with the Italian fascists while the US was still invading Italy. In May 1945, he was captured by US soldiers. He was with his wife and another woman, at an address in Venice at the time. He had put out more than a hundred radio broadcasts, in English, to Italians and Americans from 1942 through to 1945. The broadcasts praised Mussolini, and were antisemitic, anti-war, and anti-American. He is said to have received the equivalent of around $60,000 per year for this work. He is known to have recanted his antisemitism in later years in an absolute form. Besides, antisemism does not seem to be a central aspect of his political thinking, for, at the time of his arrest and later on, he claimed he did not hate Jews per se, but only the banking Jews, the lenders at interest; and the pure idea of ‘usury’. And at the end of his life, he said that he had been mistaken even about detesting usury: he had mistaken the effect for the cause, he said, for usury is the effect, while the root cause is simply ‘avarice’ or greed. So when he had spoken against the Jews, he ought to have been speaking against the greed which people allow to govern their country.
I suppose that he had for most of his life associated greed with institutional usury, and the predominance of Jews in banking had associated usury with them; and his anger about greed and unfair economic situations in Italy and England, had been transferred onto certain wealthy jews, who were reified by him into a class or a group. He is known to have claimed that he wanted Israel to exist, so that Jews could not become wealthy by means of greed in other countries, but only in their own country. It is natural to believe that people who are by nature foreign, and who have no loyalty to any specific people or land, should not also be very wealthy in that land, nor have financial enduring power over the people of that land, by means of laws which are based on a naïve trust and obligation to repay loans at interest. It is a repeated motif of The Cantos, that the state should be able to lend money, and it should not be left to Jews or bankers to do so. As we know, especially today, the banks typically lend to the state, when this is patently absurd.
‘and the fleet at Salamis made with money lent by the state to the shipwrights’
[from Canto 74, p. 12 (The Pisan Cantos, Faber and Faber; first edn., London: 1949)]
I have entered on to the theme of Pound’s anti-Semitism. I address it here because I believe it is trivial in his case; antisemitism is not a definitive aspect of his character nor of his politics. He was what you could call a Zionist, and he found the occupation of private banking offensive and dangerous. This accounts for his anti-Semitism; there is no proof that he had any interest in the Holocaust, for instance. The other aspects of his radio broadcasts and his treasonous activity I will look at shortly.
After his arrest in May 1945, he spent three weeks in a six-by-six foot cage, alongside other detained men, mostly US soldiers, many of them awaiting death, on charges of rape or murder of Italian civilians. It was a US Army base on the outskirts of the Italian town of Pisa, consisting of four elevated guard towers, with a fence joining each one. Inside were the cages, and tents; there was a permanent US Army staff of administration and guards. After three weeks, Pound, who was sixty years old, fell ill and would not eat, so the camp doctor advised that he be taken from the cage and moved into a tent. In the cage he had been unable to write; there exists however, a scrap of toilet paper with the first lines of canto 74 written on it. He remained there until mid-November 1945. It was in the tent, from the ‘death cells’, that he wrote cantos 74-84, known as The Pisan Cantos. They make up 131 pages in the first edition, and took six months to write, which is probably due to his having nothing else to do; he wrote an unusual amount, by his own standards.
While at the prison he was forbidden to talk to the other prisoners, or with the guards. But he was given pen and paper, and one of the guards made him a table from some packing crates. Some of the detainees or ‘trainees’ dug a channel around his tent, so that rain water would drain away, and keep the place dry. He was able to see a priest, and he seems to have been attending a Catholic mass in the camp. He had a handful of books to refer to, or to read for pleasure: the ‘Four Books’ of Confucius; an anthology of English poetry edited by Spear from 1940, which he found in the latrine block; and a Bible in English. The ‘Four Books’ were in his possession when he was arrested, and were returned to him once he had been arrested and taken to Pisa.
He spent from 24th May to 18th November at the prison, which was known as the Detention Training Centre (DTC). After that, he was moved to the US, where he was to be tried and then executed if found guilty; however, in order to spare him the death penalty, and perhaps because it was true, he was judged unfit to be tried, and was instead committed to St Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C., where he remained for more than a decade, until 1958; his release was arranged by admirers and friends. He died in 1972, in Italy. It is said that while at St Elizabeth’s he refused to discuss any plans to be released, and that he was quite happy there. On his release, he returned to Italy, and once back on Italian soil, and greeted by journalists, he made a fascist salute for the cameras, unrepentant.
It is those cantos, written when the war had ended, and while he was in the DTC, which I have recently read. I want to consider what they are as poetry, and what they are as an event, because they are also something other than poetry. I think that they are something else than ‘poetry’; indeed, I wonder whether there has ever been any ‘poetry’ in the way he and T.S. Eliot intended. I think that he wanted to produce something as impassive and objective as a statue, or a grand piece of architecture: but he created a massive memoire and an epic of a man, an Odysseus, passing through the century. As I have said, I think they are valuable as the work of a particular man, and that if we did not know who wrote them, they would be without much value. They are the work of ‘Ezra Pound’, and if they were by somebody else, they would not be worth bothering with. I think this might be said of few poets, that they themselves as individuals, give the work its meaning, since the work itself is flawed so badly, that it is worthless otherwise. You could say this of few men, but you could say that there has been a lot of poetry of this same kind, written by men and women about whom nobody cares. As for Pound’s own view of his epic, his life’s work, it was seen by him both as a vortex for amassing energies, and as a kind of voyage; he is telling of his voyage, and presenting a map of it, as seen from the water, observing the coast, a vantage point which he called a ‘periplum’.
But first, some general remarks on the Cantos, Pound’s view of them, what he intended to achieve, and who he himself was when not writing them. When I was young, I found Ezra Pound was startlingly interesting. Pound it was who discovered and made famous both Eliot and Joyce; and he was the friend of Yeats, and even the editor of W.B. Yeats’s work. ‘Uncle William’ is mentioned throughout the Pisan Cantos, as one of his comrades, his crewmates, as it were; Pound lived with Yeats for three consecutive years in the 1910s, working as his secretary. Yeats in turn lived near Pound in Rapallo for some months of the year in the 1930s.
To me, Pound was obviously the man who was at the heart of what made the twentieth century in English language poetry different from that of the previous century. To some extent, we now see that the radical difference between this work and that of previous times, was largely a PR exercise; it was said to be true, but not true in fact. There was no great difference, no point of rupture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; rather, a handful of imagist works, and some bluster and essays. Pound and Eliot were simply good poets and they were new and original, but they did not start a new period in poetry; rather, they themselves happened.
He was a man of translations from the French medieval, of the Italy of Dante; his work with Greek and Latin is considered sloppy, but it was brash and new. His books are direct and are meant to be exciting, not academic – while being as high-brow as necessary. There is some question about whether he was preaching to the masses, or to the elite and upper class of England. He was emphatic, and so were Eliot and Yeats: that they wanted the elite culture to continue, they wanted a hierarchy of culture, with mystery or religion at the summit.
I contend that the Cantos are not so much pure poetry, as something more like real and traditional poetry as it is always written; so long as you read it with a commentary (I have made use of the Companion of Carroll F. Terrell, University of California Press, California: 1993), we can find out what kind of man Pound was. He is characterised by three striking characteristics: first, a total lack of inhibition about contacting anyone who is important in the era in which he lived, allied to an enjoyment of socialising and moving around to find and meet the most important people. And, second, a very high opinion of his own ability and his talent for leadership, to the point of being possessed by a megalomania. And finally, the belief that poetry is the most important human activity, the highest activity of which man is capable. So, with all these characteristics at play, added to his genius for seeing to the heart of things and giving expression to them, he set out to write an epic poem; and like Milton, he shaped his life and led it around that aim, spending perhaps forty years composing his epic, as he had planned to do since his youth.
He knew everybody, and met everybody in his time – it sometimes appears. We know this, because it became the substance of his epic, this direct recollection of people he had known, their doings and words; and, along with this, the recollection of ideas and things he had read about; and he read a lot. In the ‘Pisan Cantos’ (numbers 74-84), he also records things he hears and sees in the Training Centre; these Cantos turn toward the personal and the immediate – which is natural for a man on death row. The Pisan Cantos ought to represent a change in style relative to the epic as a whole, and they ought to make for a purer poetry, given that this most gregarious and motivated of men was confined to a single place, and was forced to think of whether he had done well with his life. The idea that such a man could keep his own personality out of his poetry is absurd; although he associates himself with Odysseus, who says ‘I am noman, my name is noman’, as Odysseus told the Cyclops, this is inappropriate and a self-deception.
Being mostly recollections and reports of events, The Cantos are therefore largely recorded speech, and commentary about people, in brief descriptions of moments and images; it does not consist of reflections and a distant observation of the world from a transcendent perspective. There are thousands of such memories and objective reports. As we know, the attempt at an almost scientifically refined poetry meant, that Pound and Eliot consciously eschewed reflection, mere thoughts, things which could be done in prose. Still, even when remembering, and organising, the verse has his energy, expressing his loves, his enthusiasms, his arrogance, and his aspiration for the highest. They contain several languages, and a superb indifference to stupid readers.
However, to read them is to get lost in references which are mostly opaque; without a separate commentary, the experience of reading is bewildering, bordering on anxiety. You feel that one private experience, one memory expressed well is okay; but then another follows, and then an obscure reference to a historical incident, and then a Latin or Greek tag, the appearance of some symbols without any common meaning, all of these with no obvious relationship. That is how it seems. It would be possible to describe, with a ‘close reading’, how one experiences reading the book. But it is superfluous to analyse the style: the style is very popular, and already well known: it has been copied and done to death by a million untalented uninteresting people. It inspires confusion, frustration. Line follows line with nothing to redeem it but some unusual diction, or a single memorable image. Otherwise, we don’t know what is going on. Here is an example:
‘Cristo Re, Dio Sole
in about ½ a day she has made her abode
(la vespa) the tiny mud-flask
and that day I wrote no further
There is fatigue deep as the grave.
The Kakemono grows in flat land out of mist
sun rises lop-sided over the mountain
so that I recalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing
that had made a great Peeeeacock
in the proide ov his oiye
had made a great peeeeeeeacock in the …
made a great peacock
in the proide of his oyyee
proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable
a great peacock aere perennius
or as in the advice to the young man to
breed and get married (or not)
as you choose to regard it
at Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor
(or whatever) and the holly bush
who would not eat ham for dinner
because peasants eat ham for dinner
despite the excellent quality
and the pleasure of having it hot
well those days are gone forever
and the travelling rug with the coon-skin tabs
and his hearing nearly all Wordsworth
for the sake of his conscience but
preferring Ennemosor on Witches
did we ever get to the end of Doughty:
The Dawn in Britain?
perhaps not
(Summons withdrawn, sir.)
(bein’ aliens in prohibited area)
clouds lift their small mountains
before the elder hills.
A fat moon rises lop-sided over the mountain’
[from Canto 83, p. 125-6]
And so on. It is tempting to keep on the quotation, since it has no beginning and no end. And the pleasure I derive from reading this comes from the knowledge gained from a scholarly commentary, and from knowing the details which are concealed inside the lines. Pound is writing about the time when he lived with Yeats, along the coast. I will not elucidate it further, but remark only that a commentary or notes are required, and a great deal of prior knowledge of Pound’s life. And usually, to enjoy the work, it’s necessary to know other books and the things which he himself had read, such as the Analects, and in this case, The Waste Land, and some Yeats. There is mention of the two of them being summoned, being Irish and American, respectively, and living on the coast during the Great War. This is poetry as biography, and as a record of his time spent in the cage and the tent, like a diary. As I’ve already said, I am prepared to invest time in Pound’s life and his history, and enjoy reading it. But I doubt I would tolerate having to do this for anyone else’s poems.
And so, we resort to the scholarship, and this makes the poetry easier and more pleasant; but it is no less a stream of unrelated episodes for all that. That an epic poem consisting of thousands of apparently unrelated incidents, symbols, and individual words and references, exists, and was written by Ezra Pound, means that there is a massive failure which is fascinating for being such a failure.
‘What counts is the cultural level,
thank Benin for this table ex packing box
“doan yu tell no one I made it”
from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt
“It’ll get you offn the’ groun”’
[from Canto 81, p. 110]
Here is a direct speech report of a black US soldier, with a face like a Benin mask, who put his table together for him, and asked Pound not to tell anyone who did it. We find parts of the Pisan Cantos which are very clearly remarks on what he sees around him while writing. He has written these quite quickly, and made a record of his time. He refers to the officers, the trainees, the movement of transport around him, the local wildlife (wasps and ants, and martins; dogs, lizards) and the distant landscape; the sun and moon and cloud. But it is always interesting because of who he was. It’s not a transferable artefact which would have any interest, if it were not that we know who wrote it. It is true, that he keeps it impersonal by rarely or never saying how he ‘feels’. The canon of their poetry did not allow the early modernists to tell you about their feelings or emotions. As Hill has said, we aim to evoke emotions or even to create new emotions, by the combination of our words. We don’t just say ‘I am unhappy, and I’m afraid of dying’. This is the most you might get:
‘repos donnez a cils
Senza termine funge Immactulata Regina
Les larmes que j’ai crees m’inondent
Tard, tres tard je t’ai connue, la Tristesse,
I have been hard as youth sixty years’
[from Canto 80, p. 105]
There is better evidence that he was trying to express a philosophy. It is quite respectable, and demanded of an epic, that it have a moral or theological structure or ‘message’. It is necessary not only to write pure poetry, but to give an account of virtue; and he also expressed an idea of a world prone to divine intervention. But he aimed mostly at poetry, so he was aiming at epiphanies, at making a divine change, a surprise magic arising in the words, as the Symbolists had attempted on a much smaller scale. He was aiming to transform the words into events, I think, to make the words change and sacramentalise the reader. These attempts, and the poem as a whole, are a religious sort of activity. How else are we to understand this poetry, other than in this way: that Pound was experimenting the whole time with configuring the reader’s mind, in such a way that, just as a reader is fascinated by a detective story, or when reading a drama; where the conventions of the genre stimulate and arose suspense or surprise, or some other emotion; and just so, Pound was aiming to arouse emotions of such a kind that, as it were, the mind would be astonished, and the god would appear. It is sacramental writing.
Sometimes it seems as if, when he mentions Aphrodite, or Dionysius, he believes that the actual natural presence of them will be aroused; as ‘nature’, of course, and not as personal entities; as nature as a power. It is also my guess that he was as moved by Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, as Eliot had been, and that Pound envisaged a sacred role for the poet, or for an individual sacred king, alone in the sacred wood with a sword, waiting for the next king’s approach. There is some conjuring with an unclear notion of natural resurrection, and the regenerative force inside existence, which, presumably, poetry can and should express. Going into the underworld, and returning back to this world is written into the heart of The Cantos, it is clear.
Respecting what Pound had based his poem on, what underlying unity or structure he had in mind, so as to bring the ephanies about, in place of a conventional epic ‘story’, it is known that he had the idea of a vortex, and that it operated on his images, words, memories. The vortex structure is supposed to be underlying the apparent fragments, and setting them in motion, so that they are meant to swirl around in the reader’s mind, and then produce a new ‘world’ or vision in a sacramental event. That was how the sacramental epiphany would be brought about in the reader’s mind.
‘But on the high cliff Alcmene,
Dryas, Hamadryas ac Heliades
flowered branch and sleeve moving
Dirce et Ixotta a che fu chiamata Primavera
in the timeless air’
[From Canto 76, p. 36]
Pound was imprisoned and was forced to write his Pisan Cantos as they are, because of his allegiance to Italy and Benito Mussolini. It is important to understand why he was allied to this dictator, and understanding why he did this, and how he expressed his faith in fascism, it seems to me, is the actual power which the poetry as a vortex fails to achieve. We shall see the power of the work in the life and thought of the poet. As indication of Pound’s largely withheld or obscure political ideas, which are widely expressed in the poem, although in the style of fragments, I sample these few lines in canto 80 which are about England, and the choice which the new 1945 post-war Labour government faced:
‘Oh to be in England now that Winston’s out
Now that there’s room for doubt
And the bank may be the nation’s
And the long years of patience
And labour’s vacillations
May have let the bacon come home,
To watch how they’ll slip and slide
watch how they’ll try to hide
the real portent
To watch a while from the tower
where dead flies lie thick over the old charter
forgotten, oh quite forgotten
but confirming John’s first one,
and still there if you climb over attic rafters;
to look at the fields; are they tilled?
is the old terrace alive as it might be
with a whole colony
if money be free again?
Chesterton’s England of has-been and why-not,
or is it all rust, ruin, death duties and mortgages
and the great carriage yard empty
and more pictures gone to pay taxes’
[from Canto 80, p. 104]
Pound is not chiefly interested in England to the exclusion of other countries. But his anger is directed at it, like someone accusing an old lover, angry about a betrayal; like someone who has a deep and illogical resentment. Churchill is consistently spoken of as the agent for the ‘loan lice’, or bankers. His messing around with the currency and the gold standard is spoken of as characteristic of the type of England which has come into existence, and which was the enemy of Italy. Churchill is leading the British state to war, so as to maintain the power of the type of banking which has ruined Europe.
We might ask ourselves, then what England is preferrable to the one dominated by mortgages, rents, national debt, and lending? Is it the medieval one, the one of Chesterton? ‘Chesterton’s England of has-been and why-not’. I think that this may be the case – that the England Pound wanted, was the one which was Christian, hierarchic, feudal, coherent, and still largely agrarian.
‘Tudor indeed is gone and every rose,
Blood-red, blanch-white that in the sunset glows
Cries: ‘Blood, Blood, Blood!’ against the gothic stone
Of England, as the Howard or Boleyn knows.’
[from Canto 80, p. 107]
And it is worth considering something he repeatedly refers to (the repetition indicative of his trying to create a ‘vortex’ of words and ideas), that from Frobenius, he had learned of an African city, which was built and destroyed, built and destroyed, four times:
‘Faasa ! 4 times was the city remade,
Now in the heart indestructible
4 gates, the 4 towers
(Il Scirocco e Geloso)
Men rose out of Chthonos’
[from Canto 77, p. 50)
If I ask why Pound sided with Mussolini over England and the USA, I can say from the beginning, that it is a matter of Pound’s own sense of his personal greatness, and the idea that by speaking with a dictator, a man such as himself could get the essential things done. A well-advised dictator can circumvent or roll back centuries of decay and immorality, with a single act of political justice, so to speak. The Pisan Cantos begin with reference to the tragedy of Italy now that Mussolini is dead, and an angry complaint about Mussolini’s death (That maggots shd eat the dead bullock / .. but the twice crucified / where in history will you find it?).
Pound met Mussolini in person only once, and had a conversation with him, which is recorded on page 69 of the Pisan Cantos, and quoted below; he left the meeting believing that he had made an impression on il Duce; and he became an adherent. He later said that Mussolini’s son-in-law, Ciano (a ‘two-faced bastard’), had gradually gained too much influence over Mussolini, and that this is why things had gone off the rails in Italy, and the country had disastrously allied itself to Germany. When Rome fell into the hands of the Allies, Mussolini’s government moved to Salo, a relatively recent event which is many times spoken of by Pound as the behaviour of a heroic leader. What we can also believe, is that Pound was convinced that Mussolini, if left to rule in peace, and not drawn into war, would eventually have brought the Social Credit system of Major C.H. Douglas into effect. The philosophy of Erigena.
Amongst all the rest of it, unrelated and distantly relevant, it is possible to dig out the political statements, the expression of his passion and his intellect at their peak intensity. Here is a short description of what Pound believed the dictator had achieved, though Mussolini’s time in power fell short of achieving a complete and successful rebuilding of Italy:
‘and merrda for the monopolists
The bastardly lot of ‘em
put down the slave trade, made the desert to yield
and menaced the loan swine’
[from Canto 88, p. 66]
I have not studied Major C.H. Douglas’ system in any detail; but I understand that it proposed the reasons and the means for freeing up the productive capacity of a population in a nation; by replacing money with work tickets, within a system of registering and recording work done; as a way of making sure that there are fair wages, and enough tokens of exchange to suit the amount of goods produced. It would also make private banks unnecessary, and the state would issue notes of credit, and never on the basis of repayment with interest. The state would not incur debts to private banks, which would have to be repaid by the people through taxation. It would be the end of the system of ‘a regime based on grand larceny’ (p. 17)
‘the root stench being usura and METATHEMENON
and Churchill’s return to Midas broadcast by his liary.
“No longer necessary,” taxes are no longer necessary
in the old way if it (money) be based on work done
inside a system and measured and gauged to human requirements
inside the nation or system
and cancelled in proportion
to what is used and worn out
a la Worgl. Sd/ one wd/ have to think about that
but was hanged dead by the heels before his thought in proposito
came into action efficiently
“For a pig,” Jepson said, “for a woman.” For the infamies of usura.’
[from Canto 78, p. 69]
The lines which read ‘But was hanged dead by the heels before his thought..’ indicate that this is the conversation he had had with Mussolini, and that the dictator had said he ‘would have to think about that’.
Pound was convinced that men like Churchill belonged to a class of people, whose purpose in government, was to protect the banks, and allow them to continue lending money, lending it to governments and nations, as well as to individuals, at interest. And, that they were in command of a country because it was indebted to them, and on the hook for interest repayments, ‘in the usurers’ hell-a-dice’ (p. 25). The government was complicit in this servitude of a country and people to private banks.
And this was the cause of wars, since for instance, the Italians and Germans, and Soviets, were not using the same system of private banking and indebtedness; and that, when they had revolutions or the like, which disbanded banks and the international loans system, the English-speaking peoples declared war on them, in order to reassert the power of international finance. The war was not being fought for ‘democracy’ and liberalism; but for the system of banking and the easy money which derives from arms production (‘There are those who did not want/ it to come to an end’ (p. 64)) which kept the rich in the position of power. They were I suppose, an idle rich – who for the system to work, ensured that beauty and good never flourished, and had to ensure that the people never had enough money to pay for what was available and what was needed.
‘For nowt so much as a just peace
that wd/ obstruct future wars
as witness the bombardment at Frascati after the armistice
had been signed
who live by debt and war profiteering
Das Bankgeschaft
‘”… of the Wabash cannon ball”’
[from Canto 77, p. 60-1]
Pound is not a socialist, he does not write about the poor as a class, or to make everyone equally wealthy. He lingers with pride on his meetings with Senators, the famous, the wealthy; he boasts about it. Large parts of The Pisan Cantos are records of his favourite restaurants, and the extraordinarily talented people he met; his freedom on the road, travelling, visiting the world with the wealth given him by patrons. He is interested in the activity of talent and genius in a country, so that ‘the poor’ would not exist. Renaissance and pre-Renaissance Italy, medieval France, War of the Roses era England, ancient Greece, were places and times known for their vitality, not known for the superabundance of poverty and want. And in morality, the behaviour of eminent rulers of China, and the codes of how to rule which were laid out by Confucius, allowed workers to work freely, and the talented to build freely, without total government or ‘socialist’ government oversight and direction. Beauty, virtue, good governance, all ruled over by a natural law, a divine blessing over it all – that was his ideal of a state and a nation.
By contrast, Pound was also familiar with what he thought of as the world of rentier capitalism. He no doubt believed that things were only going to become more so, in England and the West. The fascists and their revolt were a way rebuilding the city and the country, which was otherwise going to be ruled and controlled by the dead hand of indebtedness and the financialization of everything. Perhaps or certainly, there is a cult of the hero going on here, in this belief in the Leader. He seems to have held, that the centre of existence is not man, or even the great man, but the man inspired by divine power, or possessed by virtu, as the Italian has it.
Pound would have liked to see a fascist dictator in England, perhaps; and an uprising. As it happens, an uprising had occured in Ireland in 1916, which Pound and Yeats had discussed:
‘emphasis
The problem after any revolution is what to do with
your gunmen
as old Billyum found out in Oireland
in the Senate, Bedad! Or before then
your gunmen thread on moi drreams
O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams’
[from Canto 80, p. 85]
If one were free to take sides, without any personal loss, would it be right to take a chance on the side which was not England, for the reason that England, if it were to win the war, would only deteriorate further, because it had no future without a revolution? Was a dictatorship preferrable to the parliamentary system, of cabinets and parties?
Pound compared Stalin, Petain, Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler favourably with Churchill (‘sputtering tank of nicotine and stale whiskey’) and Roosevelt. There’s a reason for this: namely, he wanted a benign dictatorship in England and the US. He believed that he could speak directly to a dictator, and that the dictator would be able to implement the sort of rational economic system which Major Douglas had theorised. To speak to the Senate, or to be a US politician was pointless. In a conversation with a Senator, the politician wonders what such a man as Pound could possibly do there.
‘Thus Senator Bankhead
“am sure I don’t know what a man like you
would find to do here”
said Senator Borah
Thus the solons, in Washington,
On the executive, and on the country, a.d. 1939’
[from Canto 84, p. 128]
And a single ruler is preferable, as President Adams had allowed, who is quoted talking with Jefferson: ‘You the one, I the few’ (p. 109), meaning: you fear a king, but I fear an aristocracy.
Fascism is usually associated with militarism, but Pound never expressed himself with militaristic thinking or ideas. The militarism of Mussolini was not intrinsic to his revolution, he seems to have believed. The final lines of the entire sequence of 120 cantos was always meant to be:
‘To be men not destroyers.’
And this is typical throughout:
‘woe to them that conquer with armies
And whose only right is their power.’
[from Canto 76, p. 48]
And:
‘[I heard it in the s.h. [shit house] a suitable place
To hear that the war was over]’
[from Canto 77, p. 52]
I said earlier that Pound was a ‘war poet’, but of a peculiar kind. It is noteworthy that the Americans and Irish who make up the best of the poetry and novels of the early part of the last century said nothing about the Great War. But Pound’s Cantos are almost the indirect response to the Great War. And his work during the 1940s, is poetry written during wartime, by somebody who disagrees with the war, and remembers what happened the last time. Whatever Hitler and Mussolini were doing, it was not intrinsically warfare or militarism, he believed. It only became so when England and France declared it so, and began the fighting.
The first of The Pisan Cantos is, naturally, the defiant and apologetic message of a man who has been captured, and whose recent colleagues and whose leader, are now dead, and who faces the death penalty. The first lines of that canto get right to the point, about what the powers led by Britain represented:
‘Never inside the country to raise the standard of living
but always abroad to increase the profits of usurers,
dixit Lenin
and gun sales lead to more gun sales
they do not clutter the market for gunnery
there is no saturation
Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the tower
and Till was hung yesterday’
[from Canto 74, p. 12]
The 23rd year refers to the 23rd year since Mussolini took office, and Till was one of the other ‘trainees’ at the detention centre.
And so, I now turn finally to that question of whether Pound was right. Naturally, he was of course entirely right, to support the possibility of a charismatic despot, and the chance that the country, the relation of the classes, the economy, the money supply, the culture as a whole, could be reformed. Now, people disagree with such an idea; we are familiar with the intelligent arguments, and the propaganda issued, since the era of European fascism, decades of works and actions preventing and counselling against putting any trust in a charismatic leader, a ‘fascist’. But history has shown that some such leaders of genius do arise. And I would mean, a leader of Christian principles, or as Pound would have it, one familiar with Confucius; perhaps somebody willing to take advice from the great poets? ‘I believe in the resurrection of Italy quia impossibile est’ (p. 26).
Today, what truly prevents us hoping for a leader of this kind, someone to overthrow the established order in England or the US, is twofold: first, the way things are done at present and as inherited from the past, is the best one can expect, because it is ‘rule by the people’; and second, we should never allow a characteristic despot of the Mussolini or Hitler kind, because .. but at present I cannot see any other reason, except perhaps that we are accustomed to the way things are, and we don’t want any trouble. A revolution would be too difficult to achieve, and it would be risky. I think that this summarises the objections to the notion of the rule by an inspired tyrant; the main against fascism appears to be, that there simply is no inspired tyrant available. I confess, that I personally have not been looking for one, and here I, as it were, try to understand The Cantos, and make an argument for Pound, not for revolution and a leader.
It is claimed that the people control the country, or the politicians do, who are representatives. Pound disposes of the idea that anyone other than the banks and the financial interests run England, with among other things, this:
‘God bless the Constitution
And save it
“the value thereof”
That is the crux of the matter
And god damn the perverters
And if Atlee attempts a Ramsay
“Leave the Duke, go for the gold”
“in less than a geological epoch”’
[from Canto 79]
Here are lines which build on prior parts of the poems, and lay them down like leitmotifs. But the particular line “Leave the Duke, go for the gold” refers to the events of 1832, in England, when the Duke of Wellington was asked by the King to form a government after the failure of the Whigs to pass their first Reform Act. Wellington found it impossible to form a Tory administration because the bankers, allied with the Whigs, threatened to destroy the currency by meddling with the gold reserves, if Wellington did not allow the Reform Bill to pass, and back away from power. That is how money runs England, and shapes the constitution; and it has done so since at least the Napoleonic Wars.
Pound also refers to a conversation he once overheard between some bankers, one of whom was Jewish, as follows:
‘”and the economic war has begun”
Napoleon wath a goodth man, it took uth
20 yearth to crwuth him
It will not take uth 20 years to crwuth Mussolini”
As was remarked in via Balbo by the Imperial Chemicals
Its brother.
Firms failed as far off as Avignon…’
[from Canto 78]
The man speaking, with a lisp, is boasting of how the economic squeeze on Napoleon’s money supply, controlled internationally, was the cause of Napoleon’s defeat. And that the international markets will also stop any individual country, such as Italy, from taking control of its own labour, its own destiny.
It might be said that Parliament is the only sure ruler over the country. But, here and there in The Pisan Cantos, there are various reports on the dire state of the Senate and Westminster (‘and a very poor show from the once I saw it’, p. 127); Pound reports the very low level of debate and reasoned thought in the houses of parliamentary government, observed by men who visited and sat in to watch proceedings. It is clear that the people are not represented in Parliament, and that that those who are meant to represent them are usually not competent to do anything there anyway.
I am in danger of embarrassing myself by concluding with some remarks about a man who had a gigantic talent, and an extraordinary influence on England. So, I make no final judgement on the value of The Cantos, except that they are a gigantic failure, unless they are read with some attention to a set of glosses; only then do they open up, and reveal the intended humour, intellectual power, the energy of mind, the wishes and delusions, and the vast number of memories and experiences which he wished to set down. The poem is so flawed that only then does it start to mean anything; and what it means to me is almost the direct opposite of what he wanted it to mean: it points to him, as a man, Pound the friend of despots, someone who dreamed of revolution and found it. In the poem, I am also interested by his theories, and his politics, much more than in the pure poetry of the verse and the structure. I am not moved by his ‘religion’, but I appreciate that it is there as an idea; not as a sacramental happening, as he intended it to be, but as something like this:
‘What thou lovest well is they true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee’
[from Canto 81, p. 112]
Pound had lived in Italy for twenty years or more, before his arrest for treason. For twenty-three years Mussolini had been in power. He returned to Italy on release from prison in 1958, he was buried at his death in 1972. He obviously considered Italy to be his homeland after 1925, when he left England without any reason to stay, more or less exiled by the class of people he wanted to influence. He had overstayed his welcome and had annoyed too many people.
The England which he left is probably not a great deal different from the one of our time. It was the England which, with the help of the US, had fought its way through Africa, Italy, and then France, into most of Germany. It converted Europe into its own image, as Heidegger also complained, when he said that Germany was between two enemies: Communism and Liberalism. Until recently, most people who are not communists or socialists, would have said that this was a happy ending to the story, and that, in 1989 when the great wars through which Pound lived, finally came to an end, when the final combatant, Soviet Russia, capitulated, then the highest good could be shared to humanity in general across the world.
England was never defeated in war, and what was implicit in it in 1939 has simply continued and developed, without any obstacles. So, we may assume that Pound’s England still exists, but in a worse, or more extreme form. There is no secret that England’s chief industry is banking; that the educated class mostly work in banks or associated insurance and accountancy, or in legal practices which support the order of things in which private banking, fiat money, where government bonds operate.
‘and the spring of their squeak-doll is broken
and Bracken is out and the B.B.C can lie
but at least a different bilge will come out of it
at least for a little, as is its nature
can continue, that is, to lie.
As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill
from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor.’
[from Canto 76, p. 43]
Pound was not a militarist, but ironically got his first schooling at a military academy. He first heard the Odyssey recited by a captain who was instructing a class in romance and ancient languages. He was not a pacifist, but rather thought that the people in command of the British and American armies were interested in war for its own sake, or war so as to extend the range of financialization, and control of the currency of other countries.
Meanwhile, what was perhaps productive about England back then, is now gone, disappearing slowly over the intervening 80 years. For instance, the population has been thinned out with catastrophic levels of immigration, so that the English will be a minority within less than two generations; industry and work has gone ‘off shore’, so that effectively a man either works for the chief industry of banking, or he supports it indirectly. Control of governments by the finance industry is a daily and obvious fact. I began this essay by showing the prejudices and the principles of the British Army in 1999, and finish by only mentioning that, as a result of the obvious annihilation of the idea of England by finance, the British Army is half the size it was then, and fully unprepared to do anything abroad anymore. It is a kind of memory of something which used to have a purpose. Finance, so to speak, has finally ruined its own defences and hollowed England out.
In the war against Russia, what little force of resistance the British Army had to offer, has been spent. The B.B.C has spent itself denying that despots, in this case, Mr Putin, can ever be any good; nonetheless, Russia survived the attacks of its enemies, and remains a nation which is rebuilding itself. Civil war is in the air in England; and like it or not, the country is waiting for a charismatic leader who will raise at least half of the people from an unfocused longing for action, organising them to attack or defend themselves against the other half of the population, who are overtly not English at all. This is how it seems.
The contradiction of the existence of a finance and banking class, which rules Europe, is that its existence simultaneously denies the validity of individual countries, and sucks the culture out of individual countries, by tying men to mortgages, rents, and meaningless fiddling with false money, while also exploiting the laws and customs of those countries. Meanwhile, with the defences and the national coherence gone in this way, several powers from distant places keep on rising, and have spent decades developing their cultures into coherent shapes, with national identities, and offensive attacking capabilities, and the ability to work and create in valid way, and a way which financialised cultures just do not have. It is possible that Pound’s admiration for a nationalistic and tyrannical man, the one to lead a single nation and allow it to flourish freely under the influence of its own natural genius, might no longer be a thing to be condemned. I tend to look at Pound himself as such a tyrant, but one who confined himself to the profession of poetry and letters, and wanted only to advise such a leader.