Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The record of Adams’s public service in his official correspondence, as selected by Pound in the fourth part of the decad, is very largely concerned with his furthering the emerging nation’s foreign relations, especially its relations with France and Holland. His duties as a minister abroad were to obtain loans to finance the war against England; to facilitate commercial trade both for the sake of the home economy and so that America’s exports might back its borrowings; to secure international recognition of the United States as a separate and equal nation; and to do all that while preserving its neutrality in regard to European politics and internal wars. Cantos 68 and 69 are consequently all about public money in one aspect and another, but mostly about how the loans were raised in Holland and recognition thereby secured in spite of French interference and English opposition. There Adams’s success is evidently due to his personal integrity and complete devotion to the public interest: in all his negotiations involving millions of money he keeps scrupulous accounts and never seeks to profit personally.

  In counterpoint to his raising of finance abroad there is at home a severe depreciation of the paper money issued by the several states and by the Continental government; and in counterpoint to his integrity there are speculators and swindlers out to profit from the depreciation. Adams regarded the depreciation of the currency as a tax very properly paid by Americans in the cause of their liberty, and as giving them at the same time a commercial advantage in foreign trade. He did not foresee how speculators, friends of Hamilton benefiting from inside information, would buy up the depreciated money and make huge profits on it when Hamilton had the national government redeem it at face value. Pound, though, denounces Hamilton and his friends at the close of canto 69, giving their names, associating them with betrayers of the revolutionary cause, and consigning them to the lowest pit of Dante’s hell where Satan devours traitors. Pound singles out the part of Hamilton’s scheme which provided for the redemption of the certificates issued as pay to the soldiers of the revolutionary army and which had depreciated to a fraction of their value—

  Mr Madison proposed that the original holders

  shd/ get face value,

  but not speculators who had bought in the paper for nothing.

  ov the 64 members ov the House ov reppyzentativs

  29 were security holders.

  lappin cream that is, and takin it

  off of the veterans.

  an’ Mr Madison’s move wuz DEE–feated. (69/408)

  ‘These the betrayers’, Pound thunders, meaning betrayers of the essential spirit of the American Revolution, ‘these the sifilides’, the diseased spreaders of the contagion of money-lust. In his judgement Hamilton’s financial schemes had planted the evil root of greed in the United States fiscal system at its foundation. Adams’s way of putting that as he retired from public life was to write of his own Federal party, of which Hamilton was a leader, ‘no Americans in America | our federalists no more American than were the antis’ (70/410).

  That sense of the betrayal of the revolution, and more generally of the failure of his fellow Americans to live up to their revolution, sets the tone of the final part of the decad. ‘After 20 years of the struggle’, Adams wrote in 1789, ‘After generous contest for liberty, Americans forgot what it consists of’ (70/412). Among other things it consisted of keeping their right to their own fisheries—that had been Adams’s ‘strongest motive | for twice going to Europe’—yet ‘there were Americans indifferent to fisheries | and even some inclined to give them away’. There were ‘westerners wd/ do anything to obtain free use of [the Mississippi] river | they wd/ have united with England or France’, even though doing so ‘wd/ put an end to our system of liberty’ (71/415). Clearly there had been no revolution in such minds. It becomes evident that in Adams’s view, and in Pound’s, the real war for liberty was against amnesia, indifference, and narrow self-interest; also against widespread ignorance and misinformation. There was abysmal ignorance about the banking set-up—

  Every bank of discount is downright corruption

  taxing the public for private individual’s gain.

  and if I say this in my will

  the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy. (71/416)

  Pound put a black sideline against that for emphasis. Again, people neither understood nor attempted to understand their own Constitution. ‘How small in | any nation the number who comprehend ANY | system of constitution or administration’, Adams complained, and added, ‘[I] know not how it is but mankind have an aversion | to any study of government’ (70/412, 413). Because of that wilful ignorance public opinion could be led by a mercenary press with its ‘fraudulent use of words’—‘newspapers govern the world’ (as the French minister said to Mr Adams). Even worse, under that ‘pure uncorrupted uncontaminated unadulterated etc.’ state of democracy, as the newspapers themselves would have it, the documents and histories which ‘cd/ give true light or clear insight’ are ‘annihilated or interpolated or prohibited’. Altogether Adams, in Pound’s account, sees the revolution which he had brought about in the minds of the American people failing and being undone, again in their minds, in the twenty years after 1776.

  In the first of the ‘Adams Cantos’ Pound saluted his hero as ‘pater patriae’, the father of the nation, and throughout the decad the nation’s welfare has appeared to depend above all upon this one man. Now that he is out of office it seems that ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. Looking back, Adams regrets that even as President he could not prevent the selling of rum to Indians, though ‘Little Turtle petitioned me | to prohibit it “because I had lost 3000 of my children | in his tribe alone in one year”.’ Again,

  Funds and Banks I

  never approved I abhorred ever our whole banking system

  but an attempt to abolish all funding in the

  present state of the world wd/ be as romantic

  as any adventure in Oberon or Don Quixote.

  When he reflects on the harm done by that banking system he thinks back to a primal image of abundant nature cultivated and shared with generosity, and to the loss of that paradise—

  their wigwams

  where I never failed to be treated with whortle berries

  black berries strawberries apples plums peaches etc

  for they had planted a number of fruit trees about them

  but the girls went out to service and the boys to sea

  till none were left there…(71/416)

  That dying fall of nostalgic elegy is not, however, the end of the story.

  On the next page two words stand out, one Greek, one Latin, ‘THEMIS CONDITOR’. ‘Θεμις’ Pound took from a letter of Adams to Jefferson in which he was discussing the merits of the translations into several languages of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus—Pound closes the canto with the hymn’s opening lines in the original Greek, as Adams had copied them in his previous letter. Conditor signifies ‘a maker, a framer, a founder’, such as Adams had been in the framing of the Constitution. But here it is not Adams who is the framer, but Themis, the very source according to the ancient Greeks of all law and order and justice. To invoke this idea that natural law and common law act together to bring about and to maintain civilized society is to recognize that the good society does not depend on any one man. It is to accept that it depends upon the physical laws of nature, the laws which regulate growth and abundance, and which also set limits; and that it depends at the same time upon the common laws and customs which regulate civilized societies. The idea of the abundance of nature with the whole folk in accord is near to that. The Greek Themis, however, puts more emphasis upon the laws agreed by common consent which express the collective will of the people at their most enlightened, laws which project and institute the moral conscience and desire for good order and justice of the people as a whole. That idea must be implicit in the democratic principle of government by the people and for the common good.

  Following ‘THEMIS CONDITOR’ there is a
coda resuming several of the leading themes and motifs of the decad, and then a 25-line finale consisting of an abrupt and violent passage concerning slavery, the absolute denial of liberty and equality; then a bridging line; and, to end, the opening (in the original Greek) of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Adams had ‘often wondered that J’s first draft has not been published’—that is, Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence—and had supposed ‘the reason is the vehement philippic against negro slavery’ (65/367). The draft had denounced slavery as waging ‘cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty’, but the paragraph was struck out in the debate so as not to lose the support of the slave-holding colonies. This fatal contradiction between the fine proclamation of the equal and inalienable rights of all human beings, and the determination of some states nevertheless to maintain the inhuman institution of slavery, would not be resolved until Abraham Lincoln could say in good faith at the dedication of the Civil War cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863, ‘Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ That was a precise and frank way of putting it, since what was proposed had been left unrealized.

  In the passage concerning slavery from a letter written in 1818, forty years after the Declaration, Adams was not directly addressing the practice in America. He was quoting from the instructions of a certain ‘alderman Bekford’ to his overseers in the West Indies—

  ‘consider what substance allow to; what labour extract from

  them (slaves) in my interest which will work out to this

  If you work ’em up in six years on an average

  that most profits the planter’

  with comment:

  ‘and is surely very humane IF we estimate

  the coalheaver’s expectation: two years on an average

  and the 50,000 girls on the streets, at three years of life (71/420)

  The passage expands the slaves’ loss of liberty and life, and the heartless calculation of profit, into a general condition. For Adams it represented the heartless attitude of Britain to its American colonies, and the fundamental justification of their revolt—Americans would not be ‘mere slaves of some other people’. And yet they themselves continued to practise and to permit slave-holding, in flagrant contravention of the great moral principle to which they were dedicated and on which their very right to exist as an independent nation was founded. Though unstated, indeed all the more because it is not stated, that must be in the reader’s mind here.

  The bridging line, ‘“Ignorance of coin, credit and circulation!”’, seems to declare the cause of those crimes against humanity. Adams may have thought that, and Pound himself may have thought it in 1939. In 1972, however, he would write, ‘re USURY: | I was out of focus…The cause is AVARICE.’ The response to ignorance and its consequences is given here in the lines from Cleanthes’ hymn, which may be freely translated as—

  Zeus,

  glorious, undying, known by many names,

  shaping all things

  in every instant

  giving to each thing its nature,

  and according to its laws

  guiding the universe

  In Greek mythology Zeus, the self-regulating life-force, and the intelligence of the life-force, begets Themis, the enabler and intelligence of self-regulating societies. Both are of course ideas, conceived and having their existence in the mind, and exercising their powers there. And it is as indestructible powers in the mind that they oppose whatever wars on nature and against human nature. When Pound, having noted that Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus was ‘part of Adams’ paideuma’, drew on it for the conclusion to this decad, he was executing a shift from the still unfulfilled promise of equality and liberty for all, to the undying idea and will behind the promise.

  Pound made John Adams his exemplary American governor because the ideal of liberty and equality grew to its clearest and most powerful in his mind, and because, so far as he was able in the prevailing circumstances, he carried it into action as the formative idea of the new republic. It was not his idea, it did not originate with him, and that is important. It was in the air of the time as a natural desire; and it was written in the deposit of English common law going back a thousand years. Adams’s contribution was to bring the urgent desire for liberty into accord with the tradition of common law, thereby giving it the weight and force of natural justice. Once embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution the idea had its existence in the mind of the nation as its enduring foundation and guiding principle. The compelling ideal outlives the striving man of his time.

  The ‘Adams Cantos’ are to be read as Pound’s instructions for the government of America. They do not recommend Italian Fascism as a system of government for America. Their clear message is that America should be true to its own enlightenment, that it should follow Adams in obeying the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution, and that, above all, its governors should serve the common interest before individual profit. He would have the United States be true to its own founding principle, that ‘governments are instituted among men’ to secure to all equally their rights to ‘life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness’. He meant to save America from its anti-American Americans.

  1 The words Pound had in mind were apparently these from Mein Kampf (1924): ‘Der Kampf gegen das internationale Finanz und Leihkapital ist zum wichtigsten Programmpunkt’—‘War on international finance and LOAN CAPITAL becomes the most weighty etc. in the struggle towards freedom’. (Cited and translated by EP in a note, ‘The Nazi Movement in Germany’, one of a set of ‘Communications’, Townsman 2.6 (Apr. 1939) 13.)

  2 that our minds be purged, says Confucius, and directed/to the light of reason.

  3 John Adams, born 1735 in Braintree, now Quincy, a town a dozen or so miles south of Boston where his family had farmed since 1638. Graduated from Harvard College 1755, then took to the law and was admitted to the Bar in 1758; became legal adviser to the Boston Sons of Liberty, and in 1761 assisted in legal arguments against the searching of American vessels by English customs officers under Writs of Assistance. In 1765 led protest against the Stamp Act, by drafting the Instructions to Braintree’s representatives in the Massachusetts legislature, which were then taken as models by other towns; by writing powerful articles in the Boston Gazette; and by arguing before the Governor and Council that the Act was invalid because Massachusetts had no representation in the British parliament. In 1774 Adams was sent as a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and was the foremost advocate of its Declaration of Independence in 1776; during the war for independence he was president of the Board of War, and was influential in many other congressional committees. In 1779 he drafted the constitution of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In the same year he was sent as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a treaty of peace and a treaty of commerce with Great Britain—in the Treaty of Paris, signed 1782, he particularly safeguarded US coastal fisheries; most importantly, he then secured recognition of the United States as a sovereign nation from Holland and other European powers. Served as American Minister to the court of St James 1785–8, and while in London wrote A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787). Made Vice-President under Washington 1789–97; elected President 1797–1801, with Jefferson as Vice-President; while President resisted efforts of Alexander Hamilton and others to engage in war with France, preferring to secure peace by diplomacy. Defeated by Jefferson in the contest for the presidency in 1800, he retired into private life at Quincy, where he died 4 July 1826, on the same day as Thomas Jefferson with whom he had carried on a notable correspondence in their old age.

  6 : ALIEN IN AMERICA

  War seemed imminent in Europe in the spring of 1939. Dorothy Pound’s impression of London in mid-April was that most of it was ‘dug up for shel
ters’. And Omar was ‘travelling with gas mask—Incredible!’ Wyndham Lewis wrote, ‘Dear Ezz. Help! Things have become like a madhouse here’—everyone was saying ‘“we may be at war next month”.’ The Tate Gallery Committee that was to ratify the purchase of his portrait of Pound was not going to meet; and ‘the Bond Street Gallery, where I was to have my show, will advance no money against sales’. It was the same ‘Everywhere…a complete paralysis’—shops even were ‘not renewing their stocks (of needles and thread, blind cords and whistling kettles) because they have to pay cash’. ‘My poor old Ezz’, Lewis wound up, ‘we have fallen upon an evil time.’

  Pound was saying, ‘There SHOULD be no war/ the only EFFECTIVE attitude is WILL against war’. More precisely, ‘My position is: No war west of the Vistula’, meaning no war in Europe, Europe being ‘whatever civilization we’ve got/’, and ‘damn the tartars’. He reproved Eliot for the ‘depression of spirits’ which had caused him to give up the Criterion, interpreting his ‘Last Words’ as a lyric outcry betraying ‘the last whimper of the exaggerated egoist Anschauung—The attribution of so much importance to an individual toothache, to the oblivion of the civic value.’ The civic sense he missed in Eliot was the active will to ‘keep England and Europe out of yet another bloody mass-murder for the profit of gun-touts and loan-sharks’.