In 1938, American poet Ezra Pound published Guide to Kulchur, a book so radically different from his earlier writing that readers may not have believed that it was written by the same firebrand aesthetician who had advocated in 1913 that poets go in fear of abstractions. But Guide to Kulchur was only the latest example of a new kind of prose that Pound had been writing—fiercely invested in politics and the mobilization of cultural heritage to its service. Fascist Directive studies Pound's prose of the 1930s to reinterpret his devotion to Italian Fascism, which continues to anger, fascsinate, and confuse readers. Insufficiently considered in scholarly treatments of Pound, however, are the important aspects of the Fascist regime's use of culture to foment Italian national identity, which have been uncovered by scholars of literature, history, art history, urban design, and music. These studies reveal the cultural, mythical, rhetorical, and intellectual aspects of that regime—more than enough new knowledge to require a reappraisal of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in that era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century.

Unlike previous discussions of Pound's adoption of Italian Fascism, which focus mostly on his political and economic interests, Fascist Directive reveals the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini's Fascist regime to Pound's evolving modernism, and to his changing prose style. In the period following the Risorgimento, Italy was (more or less) politically unified, but culturally divided. Linguistic, historical, economic, and artistic differences kept industrialized northern Italians from feeling that they were compatriots with Italians of the agricultural south. These divisions contributed to the weakness of the new Italy. During the Fascist period, Mussolini's government sponsored exhibitions, design competitions, archaeological restorations, concerts, educational reforms, birthday celebrations of ancient writers, and vast architectural projects to highlight Italy's unifying cultural heritage and to invigorate new design—all with the intent of producing a rich sense of Italianness. For a writer like Pound, who lived in Italy during this period and himself had long argued for the importance of the arts, Mussolini's projects were immensely appealing—so appealing, in fact, that he was willing almost to disown aesthetic positions that had been crucial to him not long before.