Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Italian Cultural Nationalism
- 2 Renaissance Revisited: Pound's Foray into Italian Cultural Nationalism
- 3 The Bundle and the Pickax: Fascist Cultural Projects
- 4 Ezra Pound and/or the Fascist Gerarchia
- 5 The Fascist Cultural Nationalism of the Vivaldi Revival
- 6 Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Pound's Fascist Directive
- 7 Propaganda Art: Can a Poet be a Traitor?
- Appendix: Vivaldi scores in Pound's hand
- Select Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
7 - Propaganda Art: Can a Poet be a Traitor?
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Italian Cultural Nationalism
- 2 Renaissance Revisited: Pound's Foray into Italian Cultural Nationalism
- 3 The Bundle and the Pickax: Fascist Cultural Projects
- 4 Ezra Pound and/or the Fascist Gerarchia
- 5 The Fascist Cultural Nationalism of the Vivaldi Revival
- 6 Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Pound's Fascist Directive
- 7 Propaganda Art: Can a Poet be a Traitor?
- Appendix: Vivaldi scores in Pound's hand
- Select Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I said when I first heard of Ezra's freedom, that he walked out of the gate of St. Elizabeths alone, into another dimension. I was wrong. He walked out into the same dimension; that is, he seems to have walked out into life as he left it, 12 years ago. He goes on with “all the cliches,” as Norman calls them, picking up the cudgels where he was forced to lay them down.
Who are these dummies, these ogres of a past age, these fearful effigies that wrecked our world, these devils, these dolls? Who are they? We put away childish things. It is we who walked into another dimension. Did they ever exist? Did Ezra ogre-ize himself by his association with Radio Rome? Joan laughed immoderately when I told her of Ezra's broadcast! Hitler and Mussolini flung at this late date into the very teeth of the British Lion!
It is funny. It isn't even sad.
No. It isn't sad. There is a reserve of dynamic or daemonic power from which we may all draw. He lay on the floor of the Iron Cage and wrote the Pisan Cantos.
—H. D.H. D.'s End to Torment is a memoir of Ezra Pound, and of her lifelong and complex relationship with him. As youths, the two fell in love, despite the opposition of H. D.'s father. They were poets together in London during the Imagist movement, and then pursued different poetic careers, H. D. exploring Freudian psychoanalysis while Pound invested in Mussolini's Fascism. H. D. lived through the Blitz in London, writing Trilogy as a testimony to that experience's relationship to her interests in mythology, occult knowledge, and psychoanalysis. Pound, as we have seen, published “textbooks” aimed at teaching neophytes about reading, economics, and culture. He wrote poems for The Cantos, including a couple in Italian in support of Mussolini's Salo government. He further effaced the line between poetry and propaganda in his broadcasts on Radio Rome, urging the UK and US not to fight against the Axis powers. His writing used anti-Semitic language to rage against what he perceived to be an international Jewish banking conglomerate.
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- Fascist DirectiveEzra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism, pp. 237 - 268Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016