A review of Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound must begin by acknowledging the phenomenal achievement of its author. It is comprehensive, detailed, forensic, appreciative, critical, and insightful, a massive achievement of analysis, research, and insight. At some 200,000 words, it’s also a compromise, not for the faint-hearted or anyone with even a passing interest in 20th-century poetry or history. But it is also something else, something that, despite the magnificence of his scholarship, causes this reader to focus on issues that are external to the text itself. But more on that later: first, the book.
Ezra Pound was undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in 20th century literature. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries and friends, however, including Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats, his name seems to have faded from the mainstream since his death in 1972. I read his great achievement, the Cantos, when he was in University. I didn’t understand them. Somehow they feel less like a work of poetry than a lifetime achievement, a creatively conceived and sometimes over-presented commonplace book into which I fell, in poetic form, into a distillation, reflection, or , sometimes a mere mention of whatever disparate material Pound was obsessed with. at that moment. The Cantos were Pound’s creative life, but we must not forget the enormous amount of other material, his journalism, music, prose, and economics, for lack of a more precise word.
Pound was one of the founders and promoters of literary and artistic movements: imaginism and vorticism among them. Perhaps they were not the most enduring addresses. He was American, but he seemed more comfortable in England and then Italy, neither of which choose to honor his achievements on his soil. But what is felt strongly in this man from the beginning is his conviction, perhaps his obsession with his own genius. He was quite sure that he would contribute to the arts and maybe even change his direction. He seemed to consider his legacy immortal, even before it was created. He felt that it was something new, original and lasting. And all this when apparently no one wanted to even read his material, or formally give him the time of day. And he not only seemed to deny his failures, but he didn’t even seem to register them. The limitations were always elsewhere. In the early years, therefore, he seemed like a publicist himself, with his achievements recognized before they were achieved, like a modern self-published author who writes five-star reviews and bestsellers of his own work. . Today, that would surely never work!
But eventually, perhaps through sheer dogged application coupled with considerable talent, Pound received the recognition he thought he deserved, though perhaps never in our own contemporary, hard-hitting measuring instrument of success: sales. Certain academics loved him. Others don’t. He himself had high hopes for a Nobel prize.
Noel Stock quotes copiously from Pound’s verse, always critically appraised, sometimes critically. The Cantos were so broad in their intellectual coverage that it may seem from the outside that no one without the full range of skills required would understand them. And since these skills included, among other things, a knowledge of Dante and medieval Italian poetry, Confucius, Mencius and Lao-Tze in the original Chinese, troubadour songs in their original language of oc, Noh drama texts in Japanese, the Pound’s own experimental English, apart from knowledge of the classics and their meters, it might be assumed that there might be few modern readers of his work. This is probably accurate. But there is more to the modern rejection of Pound’s work than the overtly elitist intellectual claims of it. And it is here that this review must depart from literature, poetry, and indeed Ezra Pound himself, to address the related concepts of fascism and racism.
The main reason why Pound’s name remains in the past today is his adherence to fascist ideas and his outspoken anti-Semitism. He went to live in Italy. He considered Mussolini quite a good thing. In Italy at that time he was not alone in this belief. He adopted Hitler’s aggressive anti-Semitism because he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism, if it meant what he saw as a Jewish-dominated banking and economic system, the basis of this belief being a bank owned by the Rothchild family. He also dedicated himself to broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda (in Italian and English) on the radio during World War II.
Normally, my reviews are separated consciously. I try to review the book, not myself. Likes and dislikes are, for me, completely nebulous and indefinable and even fleeting whims that are always less significant than considerations of communication or goal achievement. In the case of The Life of Ezra Pound, the subjective “I” must be included, since our appreciation or otherwise of this poet’s writing now seems to depend entirely on our individual take on his politics, even though it is neither. analytical nor pro-. active in his views, as this biography makes clear. In some ways, his politics were as transient as his current interests, as expressed in the meanders of the Cantos. But what can we do now with Pound? Should we even try to understand it? Is dismissal the preferred option? I would say he is worth the effort. Not the use of “I”! And this is not because I think Pound is a particular genius, overlooked or even readable. And I certainly don’t see his actions as forgivable! And here I apologize for making this book review something personal, something about me and not about the book, but I assure you that it is relevant. Get out of here if you’re wary of the personal.
I remember in the recent past that a well-known British TV presenter said on air that Wagner’s music was not played in her house because of the composer’s anti-Semitism. I remember another celebrity saying that anti-Semitism was the flavor of the Wager era, and that rejection of the composer’s work for that reason alone should provoke a similar rejection of everything artistic and otherwise that emerged from mid-Mid-June German culture. of the 19th century. .
In the not too distant past I re-read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. In my review I concentrated on those aspects of the analysis that might contradict the completely neoliberal interpretation of the work. Perhaps I was wrong to do so, but I wanted to challenge the idea that there is only one way to read Smith’s notion of free trade. Embedded within Smith’s thesis, however, are assumptions about progress and human worth. The Hindu, the Muslim, and even the Catholic have their place in history and civilization, but the pagan is judged as a primitive subhuman. I don’t remember Smith referring to ‘The Buddhist’, but that may be my own memory lapse. In today’s politics, how many of the neoliberal supporters, perhaps neoconservatives of their own notions of Smith’s free trade concepts, also consider those who are not associated with major organized religion as uncivilized and subhuman? And, since the assumption seems to run throughout the paper, should that alone disqualify Smith’s views on other issues or his contribution to economics? Another position that nearly dominates sections of The Wealth of Nations is that no economic activity is or can be greater than the total that the state describes. How many of these same free marketers would share Smith’s usual revulsion at the very idea of a transnational corporation, which he saw as necessarily market-distorting and almost automatically corrupt? This is recognized in antitrust and antitrust law, but how often is this side of Smith’s work cited? My point here is that we can choose to be selective, and we usually do.
Here I am tempted to introduce the composer Anton Webern into the plot. A member of the Second Viennese School, Webern embraced the atonalism of his partner, Schoenberg. Webern was perhaps the artistic opposite of Ezra Pound, being prone to destructive self-criticism and a desire for extremely concise expression. But Webern, like Pound, thought that fascism might be more sympathetic to the “high art” to which he aspired than to the mechanisms of capitalism that focused on what it could sell. Therefore, he initially embraced fascism, eventually at the cost of himself and his associates.
After this considerable distraction, there is eventually a moral, and that is to beware of anyone offering answers, especially those based on interpretations of the past on anything but their own terms. Which brings me to Brexit! It may seem like a big jump, but keep going. Trust me!
I have recent, albeit apocryphal, personal experience which suggests that the main motivation among British working-class voters who surely changed the referendum result was to “get rid of all foreigners.” I use quotation marks to emphasize that this was expressed to me personally and verbatim, with an emphasis on “everyone”. I had just finished The Life of Ezra Pound and immediately felt a strange but strong link to Pound’s anti-Semitism, which was based on nothing less than trying to find someone to blame.
Perhaps we shouldn’t judge Wagner, Adam Smith, or even Ezra Pound from the moral perspective of our own time. Because if we did that and rejected any embrace of racism or religious fanaticism, how much of our human past would we retain? And, given the above view on Brexit, is the moral outlook of our time significantly different from that of the 1930s, or even the 1850s, or the 1770s, or indeed any other time in our game? of blame from history riddled with conflicts?
The life of Ezra Pound is a forensic biography of a poet. It describes a life lived in its historical and cultural context. Like all books committed to communicating his subject matter, it is a masterpiece that takes the reader beyond the confines of its subject matter and thereby achieves enduring relevance. Relive this past. We must never deny its existence or forget its consequences. But he reminds us that as individuals, communities and societies, there is no rule that prevents the repetition of the mistake. And there is also no rule that insists that a current moral foundation must be superior to any other existing folly, contemporary or past.