By linking his cultural and critical work to Mussolini's Fascist regime, Ezra Pound found new ways to immerse himself in the government's Nationalist project. But in his odd textbook Guide to Kulchur, we see Pound employing Fascist tropes, rhetoric, methods, and ideals to make a very different kind of critical book than he had in the past. Indeed, although his writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s contain echoes of Mussolini's rhetoric, or draw on Fascist ideals to make their arguments, or contain sections built around Fascist tropes, Guide to Kulchur is his first prose work to exemplify a truly Fascist methodology. Many of Pound's prose works preceding Mussolini's declaration of empire in 1936—works as early as Spirit of Romance (1910) and as late as ABC of Reading (1934)—rely on an exhibitionary method, in which he lays out texts for readers to explore: he wants his readers to access the materials through which he comes to his conclusions. In these earlier works, Pound frequently asserts that criticism is not a viable substitute for first-hand reading and critical thinking. He famously comments in “How to Read, or Why” (1929) that “I have been accused of wishing to provide a ‘portable substitute for the British Museum,’ which I would do, like a shot, were it possible. It isn't.”

Guide to Kulchur claims, on the other hand, that such a substitute is not only possible but preferable. In a letter to Frank Morley of Faber & Faber in London, written during the early stages of the book's inception, and as if negating this earlier claim, Pound calls the book “Wot Ez knows, or a substitute (portable) fer the Bruitish museum.”