The awarding of the Bollingen prize for American poetry to Ezra Pound in 1949 aroused a controversy that is still very much alive. At the outset, the question at issue was whether a poet who in his work expressed fascist and anti-Semitic views, and who during the war had broadcast over the Rome radio applauding the Nazi extermination of Jews, was a suitable recipient for a prize. However, the controversy broadened out wildly on both sides: the opponents of the award in many cases used the occasion for a general attack on the whole body of modern poetry, while the supporters of Pound responded with an uncompromising aestheticism that in fact has often ceased to be aesthetic and bordered on the political. Peter Viereck, himself a well-known modern poet, attempts here to crystallize the significance of the controversy for poetry and culture in our times.
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Not even Ezra Pound’s most intolerant belittlers have ever been able to deny his trail-blazing function, whether or not one likes his trails. Therefore one wonders what his feelings must be at watching his pious, humorless disciples—for example, in the recent symposium An Examination of Ezra Pound—turn his rebellious originality into a frozen image as stereotyped as that of the Georgians and late Victorians whom he overthrew. The contrast between his vitality in the 1920’s and the stuffiness of his 1950 praetorian guard is brought out by reading his vivid collected Letters, also recently published, side by side with An Examination. The former book is alive. Much of the latter book is dead with precisely that kind of pompous, pretentious, deadly deadness that Pound was overthrowing in 1913.
The appearance of these two new contrasting books has reopened the dormant Pound controversy of 1949. Both friends and foes of his Bollingen prize award will find effective new ammunition in the symposium. You can prove Pound’s disciples to be pure aesthetes or anti-Semitic fascist sympathizers, depending on which particular essays you pick from the book. If you pick Edith Sitwell’s chapter, for example, you will find a brilliant appreciation of Pound’s artistic techniques, the kind of appreciation that—basing itself on the noble if unreal assumption that art is radically distinct from lifemotivated the original Bollingen award. However, not all the contributions are of the same order as Edith Sitwell’s. If you turn to certain of the others (perhaps closest to Pound’s own intention), you find Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism accepted as inseparable from his poetry. Reading these disciples, one is forced to wonder to what extent his racist “anti-usury” gospels are catching on among the more “advanced” English students and the avant-garde. As Robert Gorham Davis has noted ironically in a review of the book: “After the long religio-critical hiatus of the forties, it is now proper, as in the thirties, to tie up literature with political reform. But what reform it is! . . . Pound is made the master again, and Eliot the shrewd and talented disciple. Money Reform and Fascism become more fashionably topical than Original Sin and Anglicanism.”
From the Examination symposium, let us cite a few examples of this new topicality. John Drummond finds “cogent reasons for Pound’s admiration of Fascism” and coyly suggests that Italy’s lack of new ideas “almost forces one to maintain that Fascism’s greatest crime was not that it was too hard on the Italians but that it was not hard enough.” Max Wykes-Joyce sees Pound’s message on fascism and usury as an essential part and purpose of his Cantos, and declares: “Fascism carried the implication of something positive . . . . It was based on the progressive prosperity of the whole people; it typified for the many honest Fascists what Pound calls ‘the increment of association, ‘that economic element possible only in a group of people working towards a common end: thus ‘the increment of association . . . is affirmed in every fascio clamped to a public building.’ . . . His detestation of universal usury accounts for his anti-Semitism. His is economic anti-Semitism. That he is not racially anti-Jewish can be abundantly proved . . . . Among the usurers, however, there are so many Jews; and against that sort of Jew Pound is justly merciless.”
“Merciless” is a strong word. Does the “just” kind of mercilessness include the torture and gassing and burning alive of millions? Pound himself evidently thought so when on the Rome radio he approved of the Nazi extermination of Jews.
In the same symposium, Henry Swabey is another who puts first stress on Pound’s supposed political wisdom. Swabey denies that Pound was “an advocate of despotism” and then quotes without demur a panegyric of Mussolini’s movement by the Fascist propagandist Signora Agresti. Both Wykes-Joyce and Swabey gloss over Pound’s racism by asserting that—some of his best friends were Jews! Swabey adds such non sequiturs as that Pound “is far less consciously ‘racial’ in outlook” than was the Jewish statesman Disraeli. He enthusiastically cites the isolationist attacks of the Roosevelt-haters on Roosevelt’s “aggressive” foreign policy, and on the “distasteful facts about Pearl Harbor,” in order to prove a fact that is unfortunately all too true: “Pound is not the solitary crotchet that the mesmeric press would have us believe and was certainly not alone among Americans in deploring Roosevelt’s policies.” With a prim contempt for this decadent democracy of alleged rackets and racketeers, Swabey concludes that ideologically “Pound is a genial, if exacting, guide and, although vilification of him and his work is the latest ‘racket’ in America, one who has studied his work cannot quit the subject without a word of gratitude.”
There is also Peter Russell, earnest and sincere editor of An Examination, founder of the Ezra Pound Society of London, who has arranged for publication in England of some of Pound’s pro-Axis and allegedly treasonable broadcasts from Radio Rome. He says gleefully of the Cantos what the anti-Poundians dolefully have been maintaining all along: “To try to separate the poetic essence from the didactic substance of the poem would be valueless pedantry or, at best, adolescent romantic aestheticism.”
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It is not intended to suggest by these above quotations that a purely literary appreciation of Pound is impossible. It goes without saying that the valuable firm of New Directions—which published the Examination—and its able editor, James Laughlin, have no use whatever for fascism or racism. Moreover, in this same Examination, Hugh Porteus, Hugh Kenner, G. S. Fraser, and others offer fascinating and mainly literary insights. Only a witch-hunt mentality could accuse them of sharing the views of Russell, Swabey, Wykes-Joyce, etc., merely because they all appear in the same book. Examples of both types of Poundians can be multiplied ad infinitum if we begin citing the Little Magazines. The fairest thing is to recall that the world contains both Gentle Poundians (the pure aesthetes) and Tough Poundians (those who find in his “just mercilessness” to Jews and usurers a “genial guide”). And both can validly quote scripture (the Book of Ezra?) to their purpose.
Similarly, to draw a strikingly relevant parallel, there were Gentle Wagnerians (those who loved Wagner as a pure musician) and those Tough Wagnerians who preached his proto-Nazism and anti-Semitism and who included Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. In Wagner’s day those who, like Nietzsche, prophetically feared Wagner’s political influence were ridiculed: how could a “crank artist” ever be a political “danger”? Yet in the century that followed, Wagner’s metapolitical credo became the main fountainhead of Hitler’s ideology.1 The prior example of Wagner is perhaps an answer to the Gentle Poundians, who sincerely detest Pound’s fascism but deem it no future menace in America. They are ignoring the current resurgence—slight but potentially dangerous—of Semi-fascist isolationist rabble-rousers in our yellow press, who ominously treat fascism as the opposite of Stalinism instead of its twin.
On the other hand, much of the moralizing hue and cry against Pound’s fascism and Jew-baiting comes not from sincere anti-fascists but from the envy with which the dwarfs of mediocrity forever regard originality and experimentalism in art. Without telepathy and an impossibly subtle lie-detector machine, we cannot estimate exactly how much of the anti-Pound hue and cry can thus be explained, but certainly a high percentage is involved.
Such is the company one inevitably gets oneself into. Philistia, for example, would exploit my own objections to Pound’s receiving the Bollingen prize in a fashion never intended by me: namely, as a demagogic weapon against everything original and novel in poetry, everything that challenges the reader to effort. Yet this playing into wrong hands, though admittedly a danger, is not an ineluctable danger. It all depends on how the matter is handled (just as, for example, anti-Communism can or cannot play into reactionary hands, depending on how it is handled). To illustrate this by taking the example nearest home: I am becoming impatient to the point of brusqueness when told that my criticism of certain critics and poets is “unconsciously serving the philistines.” The charge would be true if I criticized Pound or the epigones of Eliot in order to praise Edgar Guest or at best Austin Dobson. But the charge becomes a mere diversionary maneuver when I criticize the stifling Pound-Eliot cult in order to praise the more sensuous lyricism of such poets as Yeats, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, and Louis Simpson.
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The position of really serious, non-philistine opponents of the Bollingen prize gets so misrepresented in most periodicals that the following must be stressed (though it ought not to be necessary to stress it): most of us were never impugning the committee’s motives or indicting all modern poetry. For us the issue is whether, as some “new critics” believe, form and technique can be considered apart from content and meaning. The sympathies of the committee were not with Pound’s politics. Judging by their much debated press release, their sympathies were with the widely held belief—a belief I consider unhistorical and psychologically false but not at all “fascist”—that artistic form can be considered apart from its content and moral meaning.
But it should have been clear that the Pisan Cantos were far from being a non-political ivory tower of pure aesthetic formalism. On the contrary, fascism and anti-Semitism compose one of the essential “myths” of these and the earlier Cantos. Both earlier and later Cantos—and no question of insanity arises with the earlier ones2—proclaim that same fascism and racism which Pound preached over Mussolini’s radio.
In Partisan Review, May 1949, George Orwell wrote of Pound and his broadcasts: “Some time ago I saw it stated in an American periodical that Pound only broadcast on the Rome radio when ‘the balance of his mind was upset.’ . . . This is plain falsehood. Pound was an ardent follower of Mussolini as far back as the 1920’s and never concealed it. He was a contributor to Mosley’s review, the British Union Quarterly . . . His broadcasts were disgusting. I remember at least one in which he approved the massacre of the East European Jews and ‘warned’ the American Jews that their turn was coming presently . . . . He may be a good writer (I must admit that I personally have always regarded him as an entirely spurious writer), but the opinions that he has tried to disseminate [in] his works are evil . . . .”3
Obviously, Pound has a right to publish anything whatever, with any opinions whatever. But should he also get a prize for it? Perhaps yes, if it were for his distinguished literary career as a whole. Unfortunately, the Bollingen prize was solely for one book: The Pisan Cantos; and while poems of aesthetic intention must be judged aesthetically, regardless of their author’s politics, Pound’s prize-winning poem was not intended as purely aesthetic. Its message politically was that Mussolini was martyred and World War II caused by Jews: “the goyim go to saleable slaughter” for “the yidd,” known as “David rex the prime s. o. b.” This is politics, not serious poetry, hence not exempt from ethical, as well as aesthetic, condemnation.
Whether from a famous coterie-protected poet, or from a mere “low-brow” Gerald L. K. Smith, such racist propaganda must be protested by those to whom a simple human compassion for Hitler’s millions of tortured victims is the deepest emotional and moral experience of our era. What, indeed, is our urgently necessary zeal against Communism but this same heart-breaking distress over inhumanity? To fellow authors who indiscriminately blacken the motives of all critics of the Pisan Cantos, we repeat Cromwell’s plea, in humility and in sincere good will: “Think it possible that you may be mistaken.” Is it anti-poetic and philistine to feel rather violently about the Pisan Cantos and other influential neo-fascist revivals when one hears of an ex-Nazi official boasting this year in Frankfort that, when Jewish mothers asked him where their missing two-year-old babies went, he replied: “Up the chimney!”
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Message aside, there is much downright bad writing in the Pisan Cantos. William Barrett wisely asked in Partisan Review. “How far is it possible, in a lyric poem, for technical embellishments to transform vicious and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?” But really, now, would even the proverbially objective observer from Mars, utterly free from anti-fascist “prejudices,” be able to find any “technical embellishments” or “beautiful poetry” in the following lines from the Pisan Cantos: “Pétain defended Verdun while Blum was defending a bidet”; “Geneva the usurers’ dunghill/Frogs, brits, with a few dutch pimps.”
Nevertheless, the bad writing of most of this book is a point I raise only in passing and one I am unwilling, though not unable, to stress. Stressing it would reduce the argument of this article to too easy a plane. If the book (as I believe) is badly written, then even the advocates of art for art’s sake would oppose its award. The problem is made more difficult for those who opposed the award—more difficult but also more important and basic—if we temporarily pretend “for the sake of the argument” that it is well written and then add: even in that case we would oppose the award. Not on political grounds. Poetry must never be judged by politics. But on grounds that our entire civilization, including poetry, depends almost completely on our constantly maintaining a moral heritage which Nazi anti-Semitism would destroy.
Anti-fascist admirers of Pound, writing in honest bewilderment, have asked me personally why Pound’s fascism, though admittedly evil, should spoil his poetry for me when the anti-democratic views and alleged “bad politics” of Dante or Shakespeare obviously do not spoil, their poetry for me in the slightest. The answer is that Nazi anti-Semitism is not, except ephemerally and superficially, politics at all but a uniquely obscene anti-ethics, a metaphysics of satanism. There is no such metaphysics, no such ethical obscenity basic to Dante or Shakespeare; one may disagree with their monarchism, but this disagreement does not affect the value of their poetry: no basic challenge to civilization is involved in it.
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A seemingly more telling argument on the part of the defenders of the Bollingen prize is to recite the familiar list of the great and admittedly moral authors of the past who happened to dislike Jews. But is it really fair, in defense of Pound and of his award, to cite the anti-Semitism and anti-usury of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice? One contributor to An Examination of Ezra Pound does so almost gloatingly, and indeed, the Nazis during the war performed the Merchant of Venice with glee. Does this analogy undermine Shakespeare in our regard or bolster Pound? Or is it false and misleading?
Probably false and misleading. Though racial prejudice is never a good thing, the extent to which it is a bad thing varies tremendously according to the age and the moral and social context. Though abstractly just as wrong in Shakespeare’s day as now, anti-Semitism was then not in such blunt defiance of the limited information available to that age; nor was it the spearhead of a sinister assault on liberty itself; nor was there a background of sadistic mass murder even remotely approaching Belsen and Ravensbrueck. Today we “know better” (or at least ought to, from the psychological and historical information generally available). It was infinitely more difficult for an Elizabethan to “know better” about anti-Semitism than for Pound. Anti-Semitism in Shakespeare’s day was to some extent a norm, even for men of good intentions, while today it represents the very worst and most ill-intentioned forces of our age.
Moreover, Shakespeare gives dignity to, and arouses his readers’ sympathy for, the predicament of Shylock. There is a world of difference artistically and also ethically between Shakespeare’s letting Shylock express the common humanity of: “I am a Jew. If you prick us, do we not bleed?” and Pound’s joking reference to mass murder as “fresh meat on the Russian steppes,” the most callous single reference ever written by an American artist.
Pre-Belsen and post-Belsen anti-Semitism, though both unjustified, are qualitatively different; and the former (Shakespeare or Voltaire) cannot be logically compared to the latter (Pound or Céline).4 The burning or gassing of five or six million Jews gave, from that point on, an entirely new dimension to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism after Belsen becomes a uniquely loathsome insult to all Christian ideals, to all human aspirations, to the very core of the dignity of man. This was not the case with the pre-Nazi anti-Semitism of a Shakespeare, a Voltaire, or a Henry Adams. Wrong? Yes. Beyond the pale? Hardly.
Even if, for the sake of the broader issue, we concede the fantastic hypothesis that the Pisan Cantos are great poetry, in that case—while respecting such greatness and defending its right of free speech—we must still raise the issue of whether this in addition requires the public honor of an award. Either fascist anti-Semitism is “beyond the bounds of our intellectual life” (to quote the following comment from Irving Howe), or it isn’t: “To give Pound a literary prize is, willy-nilly, a moral act within the frame of our social world. To honor him is to regard him as a man with whom one can have decent, normal, even affectionately respectful human and intellectual relations; it means to extend a hand of public fraternity to Ezra Pound. Now a hand to help him when he is down, yes. A hand to defend him from censors, fools and blood-seekers, yes. But a hand of honor and congratulations, no. For Pound, by virtue of his public record and utterances, is beyond the bounds of our intellectual life. If the judges felt that he had written the best poetry of 1948, I think they should have publicly said so—but not awarded any prize for the year.”
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How is it that no truly elegant avant-garde critic, when praising Pound, deigns to express qualms about: (1) the immoral political message or (2) the unintelligibility of the non-political parts of the poem? This irresponsible qualmlessness about immorality and about unclarity would seem to be the result of two prevalent attitudes, originally liberating but now exerting a despotism of their own. The two attitudes are: first, the triumph of detailed textual criticism for its own sake, scorning the “heresy of paraphrasing” a poem’s meaning and ethical content; second, the pushing of T. S. Eliot’s plausible statement that modern poetry must be complex into an anxiety neurosis where critics are scared of ever objecting to obscurity lest they sound like middle-brows instead of like Sensitive Plants.
The famous New Criticism’s method of analysis tends to treat a poem by itself, like a self-created airtight-sealed object, outside cause and effect. By discarding a poem’s irrelevant historical, psychological, and “moralizing” encrustations, the “new critics” have splendidly taught us to read the text itself. But by also discarding the relevant historical, psychological, and ethical aspects, they are often misreading the text itself.
A reader’s response to a poem is a total response, a Gestalt in which aesthetic as well as ethical, psychological, and historical factors are inseparably fused together. It is a self-deception to try to separate them and to discover some alchemistical quintessence of isolated “pure” aesthetics, to be judged only by certified “pure” mandarins of criticism. It may be argued that this inextricability of form and content is undesirable; in any case, that it exists is undeniable, with the Pisan Cantos only one example among many. This inextricability prompted Paul Valéry’s wise warning: “To construct a poem that contains only poetry is impossible. If a piece contains only poetry, it is not constructed; it is not a poem.”
So independent an observer as Harrv Levin has summarized some of the pros and cons as follows: “Spingarn had called for ‘the new criticism’ in 1910, without receiving very much response. John Crowe Ransom called again in 1941—and this time spirits came from the vasty deep. It is salutary that criticism, which is bound to admit a good deal of extraneous matter, should thus renew itself for each generation by returning to the direct contemplation of the artistic object. The danger is that the critic who limits his purview too narrowly, is apt to misinterpret the text upon which he dwells. Critics of the new critics, however, have adduced enough specific reminders that interpretation of the present requires acquaintance with the past . . . . We may well be faced, when the situation crystallizes, with a new academicism. The issue will then be whether it is more enlightening, less occult than the old.” (Preface to Perspectives of Criticism.)
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To Archibald MacLeish’s splendid statement about poetry (“a poem should not mean but be”) must be added the belief that a poem should both mean and be. Only to be, leads to hermetic “new critic” formalism. Only to mean, leads to demagogy, the wrong kind of popularity, and ultimately to the fatal exploitation of literature by Agitprop, which is not really “democratic,” as claimed, but either commercial (in America) or totalitarian (in Soviet and fellow-traveler circles).
The current battle of “obscurity” versus “clarity” (or of “to be” versus “to mean”) tends to divide poets into two extremes equally deadly to poetry. The first extreme, in the name of anti-philistinism, is for crossword-puzzle poetry which, whatever its fascination, would kill poetry by scaring away its audience. The second extreme, in the name of communication, would demagogically popularize poetry, in betrayal of all integrity of standards, until it reaches the widest but also lowest common denominator and is no longer poetry at all, but verse. The first group would sterilize the muse. The second group would prostitute her.
Is there no third possibility for the serious craftsman? Must he become either Précieux or “corny,” either Babbitt Junior or Babbitt Senior?
The answer is: an act of creative faith in a new and third force in poetry, already emerging, equally remote from the muse’s mincing sterilizers and back-slapping salesmen. Such a third force must prefer a difficult simplicity to an easy obscurity. It must return to the function of ethical responsibility and of communication of ideas and emotions. Any fool can lucidly communicate an easy greeting-card level of ideas and emotions. Any fool can obscurely “impress” a would-be modernist reader by incoherent and pretentious approximations of difficult ideas and emotions. Great art communicates lucidly and with classic simplicity the most difficult level of ideas and emotions.
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It is not easy to say how the new young poets of the mid-century can ever achieve the vitality and originality of the Eliot and Pound movement of three decades ago. But it is easy to say how they can never achieve it: namely, by continuing to imitate Eliot and Pound, whose great virtue—which atones for great harm—is that they were not imitators. “Woe to you,” said Goethe, “if you are a grandson!” Pound’s and Eliot’s ubiquitous “grandsons” have turned the anti-philistinism of their masters into a snobbish new philistinism. Marx said: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” Freud, fortunately, was no Freudian. The time has come for Eliot to ask: “Who will protect me from my protégés?”
These devout grandsons have played Pound a worse trick than anything intended by those of us who cannot enjoy his Cantos. They have frozen his dynamic experimental zest, which three decades ago was still doing more good than harm, into a static Alexandrian school. Disarmingly, really endearingly humorless, their school would do no harm even today, were it not for the well-meaning tyranny of its literary Party Line (now beginning to crumble) over college English departments and Little Magazines.
Pound is the keystone of this school of criticism; if he goes out of fashion, then the whole structure becomes shaky; hence, the violence of the attacks on the “philistinism” of critics of the Bollingen prize. These attacks (in some instances, it should be repeated, quite justified) are for the most part motivated not by sympathy with the Master’s politics but either by an honorable appreciation of Pound’s genius or else by the strategy of sectarian literary patronage systems. Can we distinguish which is which? “For reasons of personal loyalty, which one must respect, and for reasons of sectarian literary loyalty, which one may or may not respect,” wrote Karl Shapiro of the Bollingen prize, “few poets anywhere are in a position to say what they really think of Pound’s work.” In either case, our Allen Tates—to name one brilliant and typical pupil of the Pound-Eliot school—have Alexandrianized and Babbittized this work, not into a “fascist” conspiracy, as some Saturday Review of Literature writers absurdly implied, but into a supreme bore. They have turned the vital and original revolt of 1913 and the 1920’s into a New Academy, today’s most baneful block to vitality and originality.
In overcoming this road block, the growing revolt may be rejuvenating poetry as once the Eliot-Pound revolt did in its first exciting dawn. The American poetry of the future, like the classicism of the ancient past, will again see art as a groping search for the good, the true, the beautiful; all three as potentially harmonizing rather than conflicting. What if you seek only the beautiful? Suppose, like so much “new” criticism, you passively ignore the good and the true? Or suppose, like the fascist diabolism of some of Pound’s Cantos, you actively attack the good and the true? In such cases, you usually find yourself losing the beautiful also. You will find the beautiful only when you seek more than the beautiful.
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1 For detailed documentation of this hypothesis, see my book Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (Knopf, 1941).
2 Pound's treason trial was suspended on a ruling of insanity, a ruling challenged as incorrect by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
3 For further background, see essays on Pound, pro and con, in Partisan Review, April, May, June 1949, by W. H. Auden, John Berryman, William Barrett, R. G. Davis, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, George Orwell, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate. See R. G. Davis, “Pound: The Poem and the Poet” in the New Leader, December 11, 1950; and “The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition” in The American Scholar, Winter 1949-50, with spirited rebuttals by Yvor Winters, Tate, etc., in subsequent issues. For the ablest, most convincing arguments defending the Bollingen award and the Pisan Cantos, see the symposium, “The Case Against the Saturday Review of Literature,” published by Poetry magazine, 1949, and Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Opinion, University of Illinois Press, Urhana, 1950.
4 Here I am oversimplifying for brevity's sake. Naturally, there were pogroms during the Crusades, the Inquisition, and in czarist Russia. But they did not involve, morally and personally, a Shakespeare or a Voltaire, as closely as Belsen does the Axis broadcaster, Pound; and there are further obvious distinctions (such as religious persecution versus racial persecution) making Nazi genocide sui generis.
