An Exculpatory Industry
Ezra Pound acknowledged in March 1943, “My talks on the radio will eventually have to be judged by their content.” The U.S. government agreed. A monitoring unit of the Federal Communications Commission had recorded his Radio Rome speeches since their inception. A Grand Jury and Attorney General Francis Biddle in July 1943 leveled charges against Pound, intending to prosecute whenever he fell into American custody. As with seven other indicted persons (who had broadcast from Berlin and Tokyo), he was accused of giving “services to the cause of the enemies of the United States.” He had “betrayed the first and foremost sacred obligation of American citizenship.”
The government acted vigorously on its warrant against Pound after European hostilities ended. Until then, he tendered his talents to Mussolini in his Salò refuge. The poet wrote Fascist propaganda, dividing his time between Salò and Rapallo duties. He wrote for the Fascist press on Jews as “scum” or “illness,” as thousands of Italian Jews — among them Primo Levi — were corralled by Germans and their helpers, then crated away in trains. Pound sent his ideas and what newsworthy items came his way to Nazi news media and urged Italian editors not to use anything originating in the United States, such as articles by the “turd [Walter] Lippmann, JEW.” Pound extended advice to the Duce’s lieutenants on economic questions, belated fulfillment of his wish to counsel senior officialdom. He even recommended educational materials for the great man to peruse.
Pound surrendered to U.S. military authorities in May 1945, when Italian partisans escorted him to an American counterintelligence center in Genoa, thence to the 6677th Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa. In the DTC’s maximum-security area, he was confined (25 days) to a steel cage and exposed to the elements. His health suffered; his mood sank. He was subsequently allowed a tent in the DTC’s medical compound with limited freedom of movement. During the succeeding months, Pound wrote Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV, collectively remembered as the Pisan Cantos. He also translated into English a work (The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest) that he earlier had composed in Italian on Confucianism, purportedly supportive of Fascist life. In November, he was repatriated to the United States, then arraigned on treason charges in federal court in Washington.
As his lawyer Julien Cornell hoped, Pound never stood trial. On the testimony of psychiatric specialists recruited by Cornell, the court judged Pound mentally unfit. The implications were ambiguous. On the one hand, this finding denied Pound a chance to explain his Radio Rome show, to his mind protected by the Constitution’s freedom-of-speech guarantee and which anyway did not harm Americans or aid their enemies. On the other hand, he escaped the risk of a guilty verdict and capital punishment, as meted out in January 1946 by British justice to William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) for Berlin-based seditious broadcasts. Instead of that fate, Pound was incarcerated in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane. He dubbed it the “bughouse.” There he remained until April 1958, when the petitioning of fellow poets, spearheaded by Archibald MacLeish and Robert Frost, led to his release.
During the St. Elizabeths years, Pound continued with his Cantos — Rock Drill, published 1955; Thrones, published 1959. He produced two books of Chinese translations, centered on Confucius and traditional poetry. He crafted versions of Sophocles’ Elektra and Women of Trachis. He wrote essays on literature, economics, and politics that journals and newspapers published. Of public life, he followed the doings of Senator Joe McCarthy (R, Wisconsin): “God bless McCarthy.” Pound lamented McCarthy’s hounding by the Jewish press and other “damned liars” who had earlier defamed Mussolini and Hitler. Upon hearing a radio speech by Abba Eban, Israel’s envoy to the United Nations, Pound again endorsed pogrom concepts. He cheered the rabble-rousing violence of white supremacist John Kasper.
During time in the “bughouse,” Pound received hundreds of visitors. Holding forth in monologues on poetry or politics, or reading from his own well of new and previous works, Pound entertained friends of longstanding, plus a cohort of fresh admirers. Those who paid homage, or merely wanted to steady his morale, included MacLeish, Eliot, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Clark, James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, Stephen Spender, Thornton Wilder, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Edith Hamilton, Jean Cocteau, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Thornton Wilder. The guests had to brace themselves whenever Pound ranted about Jewry or pronounced, with increasing vitriol, on African Americans.
A controversy during Pound’s confinement erupted in 1949, when the Library of Congress bestowed on him its first Bollingen Prize in poetry for the Pisan Cantos (published in 1948). Cultural doyens, connected to the Partisan Review and the Saturday Review of Literature, were taken aback that an apologist for a wartime enemy of the United States should be celebrated. Representatives Jacob Javits (R, New York) and James Patterson (R, Connecticut) demanded a congressional inquiry. Despite such objections, the Bollingen awarding committee did not retreat. The jury of literati counted not only Pound’s devoted friend and 1948 Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, but also Robert Lowell, W. H. Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Penn Warren. Riding the New Criticism wave, they contended that the aesthetic and formal qualities of a poetic work should be evaluated without reference to the author’s character or biography. Artistic creations had their own autonomy and meaning.
In declaring the Pisan Cantos commendable, the Bollingen panelists necessarily discounted instances of anti-Semitic twist: “the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle / in gt proportion and go to salable slaughter / with the maximum of docility.” Infelicities that troubled readers outside the Bollingen circle overflowed, as when Pound contrasted Vichy’s Marshal Pétain with (Jewish) Léon Blum, premier of France’s popular front government: “Pétain defended Verdun while Blum / was defending a bidet.” When touching on Italy, the Pisan Cantos mourned valiant Mussolini “crucified.”
Whatever their purported merit, the Pisan Cantos were more than a dirge for crumpled Fascism. They also reflected Pound’s anguish, and anticipated his retreat from the public stage.
From Canto LXXXI:
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail …
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
With wife and amanuensis, Marcella Spann, Pound in June 1958 sailed from New York on the Cristofero Colombo to Genoa. Upon regaining Italian soil, he raised his arm in Fascist salute. Once a verbal volcano, Pound in his decline fell into expansive silence. Allowing for occasional and brief public appearances, he existed unobtrusively. He traded long-suffering Dorothy Shakespear for the companionship of Olga Rudge, at his side from 1962 until his death in Venice. In 1964, he published an anthology of poetry, Confucius to Cummings.
Of his own poetry, he lost the nerve to write. He made desultory efforts at his Cantos, blending remorse with penance. The incendiary had burnt out.
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
— Canto CXVI
That I lost my center
Fighting the world.
The dreams clash
And are shattered …
Let the Gods forgive what I
Have made
Notes for Canto CXVII et seq.
Whether the Gods forgave Pound cannot be known. As for mortals of his generation and those since inclined to pardon, they have needed to absolve him for some company he kept, both in person and sustained correspondence. The British Union of Fascists and Father Charles Coughlin numbered among Pound’s favorites. Pound’s adulation of Mussolini has required shrewd counsel to secure acquittal, to say nothing of his approval of Hitler as statesman.
Luckily for Pound, an exculpatory industry did develop, seeded when Cornell’s successful insanity plea spared him a treason trial. One protector of the Pound canon, William Cookson, argued that Pound’s embracing the Axis was not wholly outlandish, as the belligerents of World War II were roughly equivalent: “Neither side … was innocent of ‘crimes against humanity’ … measured by standards of impartial justice, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and Stalin were guilty of criminal actions as well as Hitler.” Lest the advantage be lost to Pound, Cookson added a note on gradations of reprehensibility: “Mussolini and the Italians were probably the least guilty.” In the final analysis, Cookson predicted hopefully, “When Pound’s errors have been forgotten, the humanity and inclusiveness of his concerns will be remembered.” Another guardian, Professor Wendy Flory, assured readers by elaborating on this point of comparison: Pound never exercised responsibility equal to Eichmann’s. Flory exonerated the poet, who “did nothing that led either directly or indirectly to the taking of any action against Jews whatsoever.”
To follow Cookson is to enter a landscape without moral texture, where the diversity of wartime actions collapsed into undifferentiated criminality. Undeniably, the leadership of Churchill, FDR, and Truman had faults. But these men were not classifiable with the twin grotesques, Hitler and Stalin, as was obvious to anyone save a Pound militant. As to the remembering of Pound’s “humanity and inclusiveness,” Cookson’s point was polemical and properly contested. Nobel laureate Saul Bellow excused nothing: “Pound advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder.” Nor did literary scholar Christopher Ricks equivocate, calling Pound’s anti-Semitism a “political and spiritual monstrosity.”
If we take Flory’s contention to its logical end, words in print or broadcast do not matter. By extension, then, the postwar Nuremberg inquest wrongly charged the Nazi publicist Julius Streicher for peddling ideas in Der Stürmer permissive of mass homicide. Worth noting, too, Streicher by virtue of his anti-Semitic (and pornographic) mania deserved comparison to Pound more than the computing functionary, Eichmann. Plainly, the scale of Streicher’s anti-Jewish incitement exceeded Pound’s. But qualitative differences between what the two men said were less striking. Pound was complicit.
As political oracle, self-deception defeated Pound, who considered himself by birthright and his probes of economic history to be a potential “brain-truster” for American statesmen. In fact, they requited only a tiny fraction of the attention he lavished on them. Confident of his fitness for public duty, he also fancied for himself a diplomatic role. When relations between Tokyo and Washington reached a nadir in 1941, he suggested this swap as ameliorative measure: In exchange for “color and sound films of the best 300 Noh dramas,” the Americans would transfer the garrison island of Guam to Japan. In 1945, Pound suggested to Washington officials that they commission him to meet with Tokyo’s embassy at Salò to negotiate peace terms between Japan and the United States. Delusions of indispensability also conditioned Pound’s loyalty to Mussolini, which stretched decades past 1945: The Duce was not only the savior of Europe, custodian of its multilayered cultural inheritance, and protector of the arts, but he also perceived in Pound a partner in these missions. Except for the 1933 audience, though, which flattered Pound’s amour propre, Mussolini did not seek or speak with him but perfunctorily acknowledged receipt of his advice.
Even Radio Rome authorities needed convincing in advance that Pound, warily viewed as an unpredictable eccentric, rated their sponsorship. That preferment never came his way frustrated Pound, in the U.S. instance confirmatory of “democracies electing their sewage” and letting the “dung flow” sweep away the patriotic and good. Late in life, he confessed cautiously and cryptically to yet another disappointment, namely, misreading the main questions of his era: “I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause.” This admission, needless to elaborate, hardly amounted to a mea culpa or disavowal of Fascism. Pound differed not at all from countless people who mistook Mussolini (and Hitler) for the world’s headway. Primo Levi once offered this explanation, its emphasis on the political leader as artist, an idea to which Pound had proved irresistibly drawn:
Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the creditability or the soundness of the things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practiced. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.
Excerpted from Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in the Crisis Years, 1935–1941 by David Mayers. Copyright © 2026 David Mayers. Excerpted with permission of Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
