Word: pound
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pound's articles supporting fascist policies in the thirties and during the war are legion, and Heymann recounts them all. But Heymann also introduces new evidence in the case of Ezra Pound, evidence released from the files of the State Department and the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. On a whole, these new documents don't clarify Pound's political behavior, which is as enigmatic as the Cantos...
...with the publication of Eleven New Cantos (31 through 41), Pound began his rabid anti-Semitic attacks with lines like these...
Most critics link Pound's anti-Semitism with his economic concerns adopted from C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theories. He believed in government management of money (as opposed to either private banks or public ownership of the means of production), and in his attacks on banks he often atacked 'Jusury.' In 1935 he had agonized over his association of Jews with banks: "How long the whole Jewish people is to be a sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not." But as time went on, as Pound got caught up in the rhetoric of Fascism, his antisemitism went beyond malevolent...
ANTI-SEMITISM was to remain an element in Pound's work and acts for the rest of his life, but there were several other importaat political expressions and acts that Heymann examines. Pound's radio broadcasts from Italy during the war, his reputed attempt to leave Italy on the last American diplomatic train out of the country, his trial for treason and the issue of his insanity, and finally the furor over the award to Pound of prizes for his poetry. Of these four problems, Heymann's State Department documents bring new light to three...
...common knowledge that Pound's attempts to collaborate with the Fascists on the Ente Italiano Audizione Radiofoniche (EIAR), the statecontrolled radio-broadcasting agency, were at first rejected. The Fascisti thought he might be sending a code even after he began broadcasting. Heymann has turned up evidence that some even thought Pound was mad: "There is no doubt in my mind that Ezra Pound is insane!" wrote the manager of the National Institute of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Heymann shows that even as early as 1935 II Duce's office had criticized a plan devised by Pound as "eccentric...