Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  as Pound told it: to McNaughton; also to John Dewey—the words attributed to Mussolini are in EP to Dewey, 13 Nov. 1934, as cited in Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), p. 257 n. 37. In a letter to W. E. Woodward dated 28 Nov. [1933] EP emphasized Mussolini’s wanting to ‘think before yapping’ (EPEC 76).

  eighteen items: see EP, note prefacing Oro e lavoro (1944), reprinted in Lavoro ed usura (1996), p. [28]; and ‘Di un sistema economico’, Meridiano di Roma V.48 (1 Dec. 1940) [1]–2—this gives the 18 points raised in 1933. That ‘taxation is unnecessary’ was a main point is confirmed by EP to Borah, 7 July 1934, EP/WB 29.

  ‘had a long hour’: EP to DP, 30 Jan. 1933 (Lilly).

  Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel: EP to DP, 2 Feb. 1933 [‘Giov. soir’] (Lilly).

  the town band: detail recalled by Guiseppe Bacigalupo, Ieri a Rapallo (Pasian di Prato (UD): Campanotto Editore, nuova edizione accresciuta 2002, 2006), p. 82.

  138 ‘end with Sigismondo’: EP to John Drummond, 18 Feb. [1933], L(1951) 320. L’s assigning this letter to 1932 is shown to be mistaken by EP’s writing ‘Faber is bringing out my ABC of Economics in a few weeks’.

  Zagreus: see p. 34 above.

  Isis-Osiris: see EP: Poet I 169.

  ‘“Dio ti benedica”’: EP, J/M 40.

  hotel-keeper in Rimini: EP, J/M 26–7.

  Farinacci: EP, J/M 53–4.

  139 ‘cavalieri della morte’: EP, J/M 50–1.

  will: this and the following two paragraphs are based on J/M 15–21. For the sentence concerning Physique de l’amour see NPL 153–6, and p. 73 above.

  his De Monarchia: EP to Carlo Izzo, 23 Aug. [1935], P&P IX, 97. Dante’s De Monarchia is concerned with the problem of how to achieve a just society on earth, and there are indeed close parallels with J/M. Dante states that the well-regulated society will be achieved when love of natural perfection directs the will to act justly (directio volontatis); he declares the opposite of Justice to be Greed; and he maintains that only under a single ruling or guiding power, a king or an emperor, will the earthly paradise be attained. 140 ‘a risorgimento’: EP, J/M 89.

  ‘I was there’: Steffens, Autobiography, 818.

  Gregor…found reason: see Gregor, Young Mussolini, 233.

  ‘driven by a vast and deep “concern”’: EP, J/M 34.

  Steffens…come to terms’: Steffens, Autobiography, 818, 816.

  ‘passion for construction’: EP, J/M 34.

  141 ‘any means’…‘the best’: EP, J/M 95, 91.

  dictatorship…‘intelligence’: see EP, ‘Dictatorship as a Sign of Intelligence’, ABCE 119.

  ‘presumably right’: EP, J/M 45.

  ‘stabilize the lira’: Steffens, Autobiography, 824.

  breaking free…preconceptions: Steffens, Autobiography, 816; EP, J/M 25ff., 35, 45.

  ‘takes a genius’: EP, J/M 26.

  invented new laws: EP, J/M 76–7.

  embargo on emigration: EP, J/M 72.

  ‘birds in the olive-yards’: EP, J/M 91.

  distribution of credit: see EP, J/M 48, 69, 80–1, 116–17.

  142 ‘nothing in Europe’: EP, J/M 93.

  ‘no other clot’: EP, J/M 61.

  ‘damning and breaking’: EP, ‘Declaration’, New Democracy II.2/3 (30 Mar./14 Apr. 1934) 5.

  ‘use of the public credit’: EP, ‘The Italian Score’, NEW VII.6 (23 May 1935) 107.

  ‘greed system’: EP, ‘Mussolini Defines State as “Spirit of the People”’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (9 Apr. 1934) 5.

  ‘firm belief’: EP, J/M 128. Cf. ABCE 38 re ‘will toward order’.

  Confucian vision: see J/M 112–13, and pp. 74–6 above.

  dreaming again…a renaissance: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

  ‘I dream for Italy’: EP, ‘Marches Civilization…’, Chicago Tribune, Paris, 5, 975 ([?31 Dec. 1933]), Italian Supplement 1933, p. 21.

  did not advocate…‘the American system’: EP, J/M 98.

  ‘greater care’…‘orientation of will’: EP, J/M 104, 105.

  ‘accidental’: EP, J/M 127–8.

  143 Roosevelt: EP expressed a measure of hope in his ‘September [1933] Preface’ added to J/M in the 1936 Liveright edition.

  ‘our democratic system’: emphasis added here.

  ‘I have a country’: EP to DP, 5 July 1933 (Lilly).

  Revolutionary economics

  There is a great deal of material relevant to this section in Pound’s contributions to periodicals in the years 1933 to 1935 collected in P&P VI, 1933–5. ABC of Economics (1933) is included in S Pr, along with a substantial selection of Pound’s essays on ‘civilisation, money and history’. The commentary and notes by E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer [W&W] in their Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence, 1930–1935 (1995) are outstandingly helpful. Other welcome editions of EP’s politico-economic correspondence are: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah (2001), ed. Sarah C. Holmes; ‘Dear Uncle George’: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts (1996), ed. Philip J. Burns; ‘Ezra Pound: Letters to Woodward’, [ed. James Generoso], Pai 15.1 (1986) 105–20—see also James Generoso, ‘I reckon you pass, Mr Wuddwudd’, Pai 22.1-2 (1993) 35–55; Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940, ed. and annotated by Roxana Preda (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

  Among the many studies of Pound’s economics I have consulted particularly chapters in these books: Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (Macmillan, 1986); Wendy Stallard Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Modernity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Luca Gallesi, ed., Ezra Pound e l’economia (Milano: Edizioni Ares, 2001). Extensive bibliographies can be found in the books by Marsh, Redman, and Surette: 1999.

  144 ‘Contemporary economics’: EP to Zabel, [? 1934] (Beinecke).

  ‘The vitality of thought’: EP to Ibbotson, [5 Apr. 1935], EP/Ibb 18.

  ‘Without an understanding’: EP, ‘The New English Weekly’, Contempo III.9 (15 May 1932) 2.

  ‘Your generation’: EP, ‘To the Young, If Any’, Little Magazine I.4 (July/Aug. 1934) 1–3.

  ‘god dam it’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 116.

  ‘the modern mind’: EP, ‘What Price the Muses Now’, [a review of TSE’s The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism], NEW V.6 (24 May 1930) 132.

  not that ‘economics’: EP, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, NEW V.2 (26 Apr. 1934) 48.

  impatient with Joyce: see for example EP, ‘Past History’ (May 1933), in EP/JJ 251–2.

  ‘worse than blind’: EP to LZ, 28 May]1935], EP/LZ 169.

  ‘The next anthology’: EP to LZ, 6 Mar. 1935, EP/LZ 162.

  145 ‘I think both you and Hem’: EP to Robert McAlmon, 2 Feb. [1934], L(1951) 337. See also L(1950) 283 for EP to Hemingway, 28 Nov. 1936.

  ‘if you agree’: EP to WCW, [Oct. 1934], EP/WCW 146.

  ‘Aw what’s the use’: WCW to EP, 23 Oct. 1934, EP.WCW 149.

  ‘fed u p (up)’: EP, ‘Jean Cocteau Sociologist’, NEW VI.13 (10 Jan. 1935) 272; repr. S Pr 405.

  ‘Against [the] phalanx’: EP, ‘The Matter of Life or Death’, unpublished TSS, n.d. (HRC).

  ‘The college presidents’: EP,‘Ignite! Ignite!’, Harvard Advocate CXX.3 (Dec. 1933) 3.

  having boiled: cf. EP to Borah, 23 [May] 1935—‘I observe these internal boilings, just like a man in a laboratory’ (EP/WB 34).

  146 ‘all my cursing’: EP to John Buchan, 22 Oct. 1934, ‘Letters to John
Buchan, 1934–1935’, ed. S. Namjoshi, Pai 8.3 (1979) 470.

  ‘What causes’: this paragraph and the next from EP, ‘Murder by Capital’, Criterion XII.49 (July 1933) 585–92; repr. S Pr 197–202.

  ‘miserliness’: EP, ABCE 126.

  147 private correspondence: Roxana Preda in preparing her selection from EP’s economic correspondence in the 1930s noted that in 1935 alone ‘the poet was writing letters on economics to about seventy people—EPEC 43.

  Committee for the Nation: see EP/BC 109 (under ‘Vanderlip’).

  ‘A Jeffersonian’: EP to Woodward, 8 Oct. [1933], Pai 15.1 (1986) 108, 107.

  that…work be shared: see ABCE 20–1; also 42–5, 54–6, 74. For EP against the dole see EP to Cutting, 11 Feb. 1932, EP/BC 71–2.

  ‘no real overproduction’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 111.

  148 ‘an infamy’: EP, ‘Ecclesiastical History’, NEW V.12 (5 July 1934) 273; repr. S Pr 63. EP repeated this or similar formulations on innumerable occasions.

  contrary to the Constitution: see Art. I, section 8, par. 5 of the US Constitution; also Jerry Voorhis, ‘The Mysteries of the Federal Reserve System’, Pai 11.3 (1982) 488–97.

  ‘What does the government do’: Bronson Cutting, ‘Government Bank Urged by Cutting’, New York Times (20 May 1934) 32, from a speech to the People’s Lobby in Washington, quoted by W&W in EP/BC 99–100, 245 n. 41.

  ‘monopolize the credit’: BC, speaking in the Senate 27 Jan. 1934, quoted by W&W in EP/BC 101, 245 n. 48.

  might have made it clear: EP to Cutting, 12 June [1934], EP/BC 136.

  ‘nation owns its own credit’: EP, ‘Ez Sez’, ‘Cutting’s Mind Was Best in the Senate’, Santa Fe New Mexican (3 Aug. 1935) 3, repr. EP/BC 206.

  149 ‘old stuff’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 111–12.

  the cultural heritage: EP, ‘Individual and Statal Views: Mr Ezra Pound’s Views’, Plain Dealer, [Brighton, England], XIII n.s. 1 (July 1934); see also ‘In the Wounds: (Memoriam A. R. Orage)’, Criterion XIV.46 (Apr. 1935), S Pr 413–14, and ‘The Individual in his Milieu: A Study of Relations and Gesell’, Criterion XV.58 (Oct. 1935), S Pr 245.

  Douglas’s idea: for Douglas’s ideas as Pound first knew them see C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy (Cecil Palmer, 1920); —Credit-Power and Democracy…With a Commentary by A. R. Orage (Cecil Palmer, 1920); —Social Credit (1924) (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 3rd edn. rev. and enlarged, 1937). Since it is sometimes stated that Douglas was anti-Semitic, with the implication that his economic ideas were tainted with anti-Semitism, it should be noted that in these writings there is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic. For a brief account of Pound’s initial enthusiasm for Douglas see EP: Poet I 372–4.

  150 Hugo Black…proposed: see W&W, ‘The Length of the Working Day’, EP/BC 89–90.

  a growing consensus: W&W, EP/BC 91. In spite of that consensus, seventy years on, eighty-five years after Douglas’s analysis—see vol. i, 394–6—the problem is still ‘new’: Herein lies the conundrum. If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer demand come from to buy all the potential new products and services? We are being forced to face up to an inherent contradiction at the heart of our market economy that has been present since the very beginning, but is only now becoming irreconcilable.…This is the new structural reality that government and business leaders and so many economists are reluctant to acknowledge.

  —Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington,

  in The Guardian 48979 (2 Mar. 2004) 23.

  too radical: see W&W’s note, ‘radical idea’, EP/BC 138.

  Father Coughlin: for expressions of EP’s enthusiasm see ‘American Notes. Father Coughlin’, NEW VII.12 (4 July 1935) 225–6, and ‘For a Decent Europe’, British–Italian Bulletin II.11 (14 Mar. 1936) 3. Father Coughlin is invariably characterized by hostile critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘populist’, with the implicit and frequently explicit suggestion that that accounts for EP’s interest in his broadcasts and writings. Such critics rarely mention Coughlin’s preaching social justice, and that EP’s endorsements are exclusively of his concern for social justice and monetary reform. Moreover, those endorsements were in 1935 and 1936, whereas Coughlin kept his anti-Semitism out of his broadcasts and writings until 1938.

  ‘populist demagogue’: see W&W, ‘Huey Long and the “Share Our Wealth Plan”’, EP/BC 93.

  ‘splendid education’: Woodward to EP, 7 Mar. 1935, cited by W&W, EP/BC 94.

  ‘Better a wild man’: EP, ‘More Jazz’, unpublished light verse submitted to New Democracy, [? 1935] (HRC).

  ‘Long wants’: EP, ‘huey , God bless him’, unpublished TSS sent to New Democracy ‘13 or 14 Aug.’ 1935 (HRC)—reproduced here as Appendix D. For EP’s covering letter to Gorham Munson see EPEC 158–9.

  153 ‘With sane economics’: EP to Woodward, 8 Oct. [1933], Pai 15.1 (1986) 108; also EPEC 68.

  ‘utterly necessary’…‘inconceivable’: EPEC 68; re England, see EP to John Buchan, [1934], ‘Letters to John Buchan, 1934–1935’, Pai 8.3 (1979) 467.

  ‘“Never”, said Winston’: 41/204–5.

  ‘the mind of the people’: EP, ‘Social Credit: An Impact’ (1935), as in Impact 144.

  ‘the few powerful’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VII.13 (11 July 1935), 245.

  ‘Can’t move ’em’: see ABCE 35, J/M 27, Cantos 19/85, 78/481, 117/678, 113/735, and EP: Poet I 407

  154 ‘to base a system on will’: ABCE 33, 38.

  ‘the first writer’: EP, ‘The Acid Test’, Biosophical Review IV.2 (Winter 1934/5) 23.

  ‘an heretical movement’: EP, ‘Personalia’, NEW II.19 (23 Feb. 1933) 443.

  in his De Monarchia: see Bk. I, chap. xi.

  Pound’s agitprop prose: see pp. 99, 106–7 above.

  ‘Sir,—Without claiming’: EP, ‘Stamp Scrip’, NEW V.7 (31 May 1934) 167. My paragraph is indebted to Flory, The American Ezra Pound, pp. 71–2. For Pound’s review article around Gesell’s The Natural Economic Order see ‘The Individual in his Milieu: A Study of Relations and Gesell’ (1935), S Pr 242–52. For detailed accounts of the theory and practice of stamp scrip see the relevant chapters in Flory, Redman, and Surette: 1999. For John Maynard Keynes’s recognition of Gesell as ‘an unduly neglected prophet’ see his The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (Macmillan & Co., 1936), pp. 353–8.

  155 how the miracle was worked: in fact it can be explained very simply— Imagine for a moment you come across an unexpected ten pounds…you go out and spend it all at once on, say, two pairs of woolly socks. The person from the sock shop then takes your tenner and spends it on wine, and the wine merchant spends it on tickets to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and the owner of the cinema spends it on chocolate, and the sweet-shop owner spends it on a bus ticket, and the owner of the bus company deposits it in the bank. That initial ten pounds has been spent six times, and has generated £60 of economic activity. In a sense no one is any better off; and yet, that movement of money makes everyone better off. To put it another way, that first tenner has contributed £60 to Britain’s GDP. Seen in this way, GDP can be thought of as a measure…of velocity.

  —John Lanchester, ‘Let’s Call it Failure’, LRB 35.1 (3 Jan. 2013) 3.

  ‘the state need not borrow’, ‘all the slobs’: 74/441.

  ‘strangle hold’: EP, ‘Slim Hope’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (3 July 1933) 4.

  Borah’s similar views: see EP/WB 7 n. 5.

  ‘Sir: As an Idahoan’: EP to Wm. A. Borah, 27 Nov. 1933, EP/WB [1].

  ‘“As an Idahoan”’: Borah to EP, 3 Jan. 1934, EP/WB 4.

  156 ‘Thank you’: Borah to EP, 30 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 45.

  a traitor to America: see EP/WB 27 n. 2.

  ‘KINGFISH’: EP to Huey Long, 13 Apr. 1935 (Beinecke)—as in Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism 161; also in EPEC 148.

  157
‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’: 74/441; see also EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1917), LE 420.

  ‘The people’: EP to Borah, 23 [May] 1935, EP/WB 35.

  158 ‘Roose(n)velt’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VII.12 (4 July 1935) 225. In his ‘American Notes’ in NEW VI.13 (10 Jan. 1935), EP wrote, ‘There is positively no evidence against Roosevelt’s being utterly under the thumb of international finance.’

  ‘S/S/ should attack’: EP to R. C. Summerville of the Silver Shirt Legion of America, 7 May 1934, as published by New Masses XVIII.12 (17 Mar. 1936) 15.

  ‘The anti-semitic fury’: EP to [Graham Seton] Hutchinson, 26 May 1936, EPEC 190. In this connection see Miranda B. Hickman on ‘Pound and Arnold Leese’, EP/SN 289–93.

  Mussolini’s speech: Mussolini’s words (in my translation) are from Pound’s marked copy of the printed version of his speech (Brunnenburg). EP’s comments are from his ‘The Acid Test’, Biosophical Review IV.2 (Winter 1934/35) 22ff. See also his letter dated 29 Oct. [1934], New York Herald, Paris (1 Nov. 1934) 4.

  Making music of history: ‘Cantos 31–41’

  159 ‘An epic is’: EP in unpublished draft preface [for Polite Essays], (c.1936) (Beinecke).

  ‘Never has been’: EP to John Hargrave, [? 1935] (Beinecke).

  ‘The poet’s job’: EP to Basil Bunting, Dec. 1936, L(1951) 366.

  ‘to get economic good’: EP to Mary Barnard, 13 Aug. 1934, L(1951) 346.

  160 ‘Tempus loquendi’: EP, ‘Three Cantos’ [XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII], Pagany II.3 (July/Sept. 1931), 43.

  ‘ten fat volumes’: EP, ‘The Central Problem’, Townsman IV.13 (Mar. 1941) 15—translation from ‘L’economia ortologica: Il problema centrale’ (1937).

  An early reviewer: Philip Blair Rice, ‘The Education of Ezra Pound’, Nation CXXXIX (21 Nov. 1934) 599–600, in Homberger: 1972, 292–3.

  161 ‘a great ruin’: J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Marvels of Walter Benjamin’, New York Review of Books XLVIII.1 (11 Jan. 2001) 33.