Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Waiting for the compliance report of the Boston Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is like waiting for the Rome-to-Milan train in pre-Mussolini Italy--it never comes...
...reportedly disgusted with Paris, and that generally describes his feelings about London, when he left there for Paris in 1921. But whatever his motives for moving to Italy--it could have been sheer caprice--Pound, by the following year, was converted to Fascism. "I personally think extremely well of Mussolini," he wrote to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine in November, 1925. "If one compares him to American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc., in fact one cannot without insulting him. If the intellegentsia don't think well of him, it is because they know nothing about 'the state...
Pound praised II Duce in his book of 1935, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, for all of the usual things: "grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swampdrainage, restorations, new buildings..." But clearly he was as much as anything else, carried away by his own rhetoric. In the same tome he called Mussolini an "OPPORTUNIST who is RIGHT," an "AWARE INTELLIGENCE," who was introducing "a new LANGUAGE in the debates in the chamber." He was according to Pound, a statesman of "deep 'concern' or will for the welfare of Italy," right down to "the last ploughman and the last girl in the oliveyards...." It seems...
...time went on, as Pound got caught up in the rhetoric of Fascism, his antisemitism went beyond malevolent symbolism. Heymann tends to agree with Robert Fitzgerald's theory of Pound's anti-Semitism, that is, that Pound had become isolated and failed to understand the implications of Hitler's, Mussolini's and even his own rhetoric. But Heymann goes on to theorize that one of the causes of Pound's anti-Semitism was that "he had simply taken on too much...dispersing himself beyond his human limitations...
There is another small point of contention surrounding Pound's collaboration with the Fascisti. Pound's defense was that he had a signed agreement with Mussolini's government--actually broadcast over the air--which read in part, Pound "will not be asked to say anything contrary to his conscience or contrary to his duties as an American citizen." The problem was really that Pound didn't understand the difference between intent and action. Even Camillo Pellizzi, the president of the Fascist Institute of Culture, said Pound was legally a traitor, but that the poet thought it was his "duty...