I find that many of the writers I admire have expressed some terrible attitudes and beliefs or have behaved horribly in their personal lives. Pound is among the worst, but then there are Eliot, Hemingway, Yeats, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Rilke, and so on.
For me, Pound's case is ameliorated if at all by the fact that he was so extraordinarily generous to other writers in his long life and that he was a key thinker about modernism whose essays still bear rereading after all these many long decades.
Here's how I understand the Pound antisemitism fiasco:
With the collapse of world financial markets in the Great Depression many artists and writers were attracted to communism, feeling that capitalism was a broken system, and thus you have the jarring fact of wonderful, ethical poets like Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes writing poems in praise of Stalin and the Soviet Union.
The somewhat crackpot theories of Major Douglas on Social Credit were a now-forgotten alternative for ethically-minded, radical writers who thought our economic system to be corrupt, exploitative, and undemocratic but who couldn't stomach communism (even Williams flirted with Social Credit, but in the end he couldn't stomach it--his only true religion was art). Thus, like many writers of his generation, Pound's attraction to Social Credit came from a good place, and from this attraction came all of his rants against "usury." His scapegoating of the Jews says lots about his own ethical deficiencies, but it emerges from Major Douglas's conspiratorial rants against the "international Jewry." In brief, Pound was an idiot as to economics who followed a crackpot and whose antisemitism comes in part from his dedication to that crackpot. It doesn't excuse Pound, but it gives some context. All evil comes from a twisted attempt to do good, after all.
I haven't generally found his poetry particularly moving, though. In practice, his tendency towards the blow-hard is in full display. The problem with the Cantos is less their experimental nature than the fact that when you go to the trouble of decoding them they deliver you such profoundly stupid ideas: the celebration of the artistic social order that comes from great men, as manifested in Malatesta and Mussolini, and his attacks on Jews and usury and banking as manifesting a failed social order.
When I do like Pound it's usually because he's being derivative of other great poets. For example, I do like this little early orientalist lyric:
The Encounter
All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I arose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.
And of course,
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound!
Hybrid Mode
