Poetry and politics

Pound is one of the most important figures of modern poetry, and one of the most controversial. To his admirers, he rethought what poetry was for the modern world, a world of banks and arms manufacturers as well as meadows and larks. To his enemies, Pound's innovations were motivated by a contempt for the ordinary reader that sent modern poetry fatally off course, an error confirmed by his slide into fascist politics. To see what we are dealing with, take Figure 1, a not untypical section of Pound's epic The Cantos, begun as he lay a prisoner of US Forces in Pisa, Italy, in 1945, following his inflammatory and anti-Semitic broadcasts on behalf of Italian fascism during the Second World War, and finished in St Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital, New Jersey, where he was remanded after being found unfit to stand trial:

It is written in a mixture of English, Italian, Greek, Latin, Provençal and Chinese. It looks like an unrelated series of cryptic references, which, when unpacked by years of patient scholarship, turn out to be:

1. A link between three Chinese men praised by Confucius for their resistance to the cruel Emperor Cheou-sin, three leading Italian fascists (including il Capo Mussolini) and three fascist collaborators recently executed by Allied forces.

2. A comparison between US Ambassador and later Major William Bullitt (whom Pound insinuates had moved into diplomacy when tipped off that his business interests were about to slide) with Pound's wife Dorothy, who sold her inherited shares at a loss so as not to be implicated in the arms industry.

3. A line from Dante's Purgatory where the poet Arnaut Daniel asks for Dante's prayers when he ‘comes to the top of the stair’ to Paradiso (retranslated back from Italian into Daniel's native Provençal); the untranslatable Greek word ‘ethos’ meaning ‘character’ or ‘custom’ from which we get our word ‘ethics’; the Chinese ideograms ming (meaning ‘light’ and ‘clarity’) and chung (‘middle’ or ‘balance’); the great architects of American democratic balance, President John Adams, and his brother Samuel Adams, as well the Georgian grace of the architects and designers Robert and John Adam.

And all this in a passage officially in praise of clarity. That, Pound's critics say, is where Pound's kind of modernism leads: the slivers of incoherent phrase, the intimidatingly wide references, the swagger in splicing his own story and great historical figures, the aggressive tone and ruthless politics, all these are of a piece, and stem from the revolution he began thirty years earlier.