Homage to Ezra Pound

C.K. Stead

• The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound by Michael Alexander
  Faber, 247 pp, £7.95, April 1979, ISBN 0 571 10560 2
• Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos by Anthony Woodward
  Routledge, 128 pp, £7.95, April 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0372 2
• Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle by Wendy Stallard Flory
  Yale, 321 pp, £12.60, July 1980, ISBN 0 300 02392 8
• Ezra Pound and His World by Peter Ackroyd
  Thames and Hudson, 127 pp, £5.95, February 1981, ISBN 0 500 13069 8
• End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound with Poems from Ezra Pound’s H.D. Book edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King
  Carcanet, 84 pp, £2.95, February 1980, ISBN 0 85625 318 9

In 1949 when a panel of his fellow poets (including T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and Allen Tate) awarded Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos there was an immediate and angry public debate. The reaction is not surprising and might have been worse had the texts of Pound’s wartime broadcasts over Rome Radio been publicly available. What is surprising is that the award was made to him and that thirty years later it appears to have been thoroughly deserved. Pound’s broadcasts contained naked anti-semitism and economic balderdash. His support for Mussolini in Italy was unwavering, even after the defeat. Canto 74 opens with ‘the tragedy’ of the death of Mussolini, who in the course of the sequence is bracketed with Manes, the Albigenses, and Pound himself, as heretic martyrs. In Canto 84, written during October 1945, Pound not only honours the memory of Mussolini (‘Il Capo’) and various dead Fascist ministers, but salutes the traitor premiers, Laval and Quisling, as they go to face their firing-squads.