IV.

Political Alienation

The devastation caused by World War I (1914-1918) deepened Pound’s disillusion with the West, which he labeled “a botched civilization.” His bitterness was visible in his satirical volume Hugh Selwyn Mauberly: Life and Contacts (1920), which describes the “tawdry cheapness” and deterioration of a modern America Pound called “a half-savage country.” Believing that capitalism marginalized or excluded poets, Pound sought countries that he felt were more hospitable and left England in 1920. He moved first to France and then to Italy, where in 1925 he settled in the village of Rappallo. Pound saw Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as a potential savior of the world from capitalism. In 1933 he met Mussolini, who praised his poetry. Pound became an active supporter of fascism, promoting it on radio broadcasts to England and the United States during World War II (1939-1945). In anticapitalist and anti-Semitic speeches, Pound denounced those he held responsible for the West’s decline—in particular, Jewish bankers.

When the Allied troops occupied Italy in 1945 near the end of World War II, Pound was imprisoned for weeks in an open-air cage. After being transferred to a medical tent, he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1948), which consist of ten sections describing the prison, its environment, and its inhabitants. Because of their vivid imagery and unity as a whole, these poems are regarded by some as his finest poems. In 1946 Pound was taken to Washington, D.C., to be tried for treason. His trial was canceled after he was declared legally insane, and he entered a hospital for the criminally insane, where he continued to write and to receive visitors. In 1949 Pound’s Pisan Cantos won the first annual Library of Congress Bollingen Award for Poetry, reopening the debate over his literary stature. Strongly defended by several prominent writers, including Hemingway, Frost, and Archibald MacLeish, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to Italy. Pound spent his final years in self-imposed literary silence, leaving the Cantos incomplete.

Despite the reprehensible politics of his later life, Pound was an important poet and literary innovator who forged the way to modernism while retaining an allegiance to literary tradition. Editions of Pound’s writings include Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937), The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1950), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954), Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (1976), and Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology (1970).