"Put not your trust in princes ... ."

I realize Ezra Pound was a fascist.

While his Cantos, yellowed and tattered in hardback, sits not forty feet from my elbow here at the public library (where I've posted all these), so does The Trial of Ezra Pound -- the account written by his attorney after defending him against a charge of treason. (Pound was found not competent to stand trial.)

I have been aware of Pound's some 300 broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini and the Axis powers during World War II for decades, my Poetry 101 professor in college even discussing the issue with us in class, having been himself a WWII vet in North Africa who'd heard some of Pound's radio diatribes (if they can be called even that) while there. He pointed out to us that Faber & Faber remained his UK publisher during that period, and that some people back then thought it was good that "the trains ran on time" when Mussolini first came to power.

Shortly after I became more aware of just how bad these broadcasts were (while reading an article in yet another public library by {I think, not sure} Kenneth Koch in the early 1980s), I bundled up most of my Pound-related books and handed them over to charity.

In the bookstore boom of the late 1990s, I rebought Confucius to cummings, the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, and Rimbaud's Illuminations -- an author Pound put in his pet literary canon, as can be seen in the essay "How to Read" in his Literary Essays. I checked my boxes of books in storage today, and the Selected Poems appears to be missing. I'm sure I donated that one all over again. My relationship to this author is complicated, to say the least.

A transcript of some of his broadcasts surfaced on the 'net last year, and what I thought I knew about Pound fell through a trapdoor into Chaos. I'd had no idea they were that bad. Had I been foreman of a jury and saw those transcripts, Pound would have gotten the firing squad. Or I would have resigned in protest. No problem.

I want to be as clear as possible: to say I find the reality of Pound's Fascist background deplorable would be far too mild a word. Unforgiveable? It all happened before I was born, so I'm not in that position. I just don't know a word that would fit.

But without Pound's Literary Essays and Personae, I would not be the writer I am. I probably wouldn't be one at all. Maybe some of you (many? how would I know?) think that would have been a good thing. (Could I have just gone to law school instead? Wallace Stevens did. I don't like Wallace Stevens' poetry. It's not bad -- it just never grabbed me, that's all. Including "Sunday Morning". I mean, you'd think ... but no. Sorry.)

Why am I going into all this? "Antennae of their race" in my ballata below was not intended as a compliment to Pound's legacy. (Read the whole verse again, if you're not sure.) But my interest in Italian poetry, French poetry, German poetry, and my sustained interest in English poetry and just plain poetry all derive from his writing -- so that's why he's also the subject of an allusion in my ballade posted before the ballata in this blog -- not necessarily as a compliment, but as an attempt to be accurate.

In sum, I'm going to stand by my assessment and advice I first wrote in my post From C to Shining c in this blog -- mainly because continued hand-wringing over the crimes of someone who's dead and gone won't change anything, except to learn from their mistakes when possible and to amend them where possible.

I'll add one more note: also about forty feet from my elbow right now is an (out of print) slim paperback from those past masters of the slim paperback: Dover. It's called Early Poems of Ezra Pound. Some of his earliest work stands on its own and deserves to be in its own little collection.

That so much of the rest of Pound's work can be so often troubling is headstone (and lesson) enough.