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Pound's Cantos: A Fascist Epic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John Lauber
John Lauber
Affiliation:
Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.
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Extract

It should no longer be necessary to speak with careful qualification of Ezra Pound's “ alleged ” fascism, or “ alleged ” anti-Semitism. The man who saw in Mussolini the greatest European leader since Napoleon (and believed that both were brought down by Jewish usurers), who in his wartime broadcasts praised Mein Kampf for its “ keen historical analysis ” and advised his hearers to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who in those same broadcasts spoke of “ kikes, sheenies and oily people ” and referred to American “ Jewspapers,” who in his Cantos quotes approvingly a forged statement by Franklin warning Americans to keep out the Jews, who gave most of his energies during the last year and a half of the war to propagandizing for Mussolini's Salo Republic and was described by its officials as “ the collaborator Ezra Pound ” — that man can accurately be termed a fascist.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 1978 , pp. 3 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 Abundant evidence on these points is provided by Heymann, C. D.'s Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (New York: Viking Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

2 All quotations from the Cantos are taken from The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1964)Google Scholar.

3 Quoted in Stern, J. P., Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 81Google Scholar.

4 Quoted in Nolte, Ernst, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 403Google Scholar.

5 Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 516Google Scholar. Pound actually wrote to Mussolini offering him these Cantos.

6 Emery, Clark M., Ideas Into Action (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1958), p. 60Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 126.

8 Ibid., p. 126.

9 Pound, Ezra, “A Visiting Card,” in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. Cookson, William (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 279Google Scholar.

10 Ciano, Galeazzo, The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943, ed. Gibson, Hugh (New York: Doubleday, 1946), p. 281Google Scholar.

11 Hibbert, Christopher, Benito Mussolini (London: Longman, 1962), p. 132Google Scholar.

12 Emery, p. 59.

13 Gregor, A. James, The Ideology of Fascism (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 326Google Scholar.

14 Pound, Ezra, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New York: Liveright, 1936), p. 15Google Scholar.

15 Stock, p. 515.

16 Gregor, p. 223.

17 Ibid.

18 Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, etc., trans. Pound, Ezra (New York: New Directions, 1969), pp. 29–31Google Scholar.

19 Dembo, L. S., The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound (Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 20Google Scholar.

20 Pound, Ezra, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 135–36Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 95.

22 del Mar, Alexander, Money and the Nature of Civilization (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

23 Emery, p. 85.

24 See Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., p. 14.

26 Ibid., p. 29. Italics in original.

27 Ibid., p. 32.

28 Ibid., pp. 35–36.

29 Emery, p. 50.

30 Quoted in Stern, pp. 40–41.

31 Hofstadter, pp. 35–36.

32 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, pp. 15–16.

33 Quoted in Gregor, A. James, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 243–44Google Scholar.

34 Quoted in Stern, p. 45.

35 Pound, , “What Is Money For,” in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, p. 270Google Scholar. Hardness, of course, was also a major fascist virtue. Adolf Hitler may be cited: “I am the hardest man the German people has had for many decades, perhaps centuries.” (Quoted in Stern, p. 76.)

36 Stern, p. 110.

37 Guide to Kulchur, p. 34.

38 The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Paige, D. D. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 249Google Scholar.

39 Stern, p. 60.

40 Quoted in Stock, p. 363.

41 Chace, William M., The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 69Google Scholar.

42 de Gourmont, Remy, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans., with a Postscript by Pound, Ezra (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), p. 170Google Scholar.

43 Emery, p. 57.