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  • Pound and Eliot
  • Alec Marsh and Matthew Hofer

i Ezra Pound

a. Biography

Karen Leick, "Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound's FBI File," pp. 105–25 in Modernism on File, shows that many of the people interviewed by the FBI concurred that Pound was "mentally unbalanced," "insane," and a "crack-pot." Leick points out that it was not in the government's interest to prove Pound insane—to prove treason the Justice Department needed a sane defendant. We wish Pound to be sane because the taint of insanity seems to devalue the poetry, but Leick attempts to debunk that idea as too convenient by drawing on the work of Louis Sass (Madness and Modernism, 1992): madness can be the expression of insight; it is not always a retreat from the world but the ability to see through it. "It is certainly true," Leick concludes, "that to classify Pound as insane is a political act, but the decision by Pound critics not to discuss the possibility … is also a political decision," and one that protects us, not the poet.

In "Ezra Pound and Otto Kahn" (JML 32, ii: 118–32) Barry Ahearn draws large conclusions from the lone meeting and brief correspondence between the New York banker and the poet. Pound approached the millionaire Kahn as a possible patron (not so much for himself but for the New York Objectivists) who could do artists good if only he would let Pound show him how. Kahn, beset by the Depression, declined Pound's advice on the arts and on capitalism. He sent Pound his own views in [End Page 153] a pamphlet called "A Few Thoughts on the Depression," a knee-jerk defense of the free play of capital and against government intervention in the economy. Pound's views were evolving in a very different direction at this juncture, which is immediately prior to his sudden turn toward belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Ahearn argues that the brush-off by Kahn helped precipitate Pound's turn.

b. Books

Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt, the conference papers from the 2005 Pound Conference in Rapallo have been published as Ezra Pound, Language and Persona (Genova: Università degli studi di Genova), a volume that also offers poetry by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Rehder, Stephen Romer, and Kevin Kiely and includes an illustrated walking guide to Rapallo and the region, "Tigullio Itineraries: Ezra Pound and His Friends" (also published separately).

The papers themselves are spread arbitrarily over two sections, "Personae" and "Languages," reflecting the broad conference theme. Space precludes a full discussion, but some articles are of outstanding interest. Dr. Romolo Rossi ("A Psychiatrist's Recollections of Ezra Pound," pp. 144–49), who treated Pound for depression in Genoa in 1966, after Pound's prostate operation, and who had access to Pound's psychiatric records from Washington, states unequivocally that the poet suffered from bipolar disorder, the first time, I think, that such a diagnosis has come from an authoritative source. (We also learn from him that Pound was subjected to "electro-convulsive therapy" at St. Elizabeths.) For Rossi "the broadcasts attacking America" are "a primal scene attack" on a "cold and artificial mother." The best part of Robert Rehder's "The Cantos: Language of Sensation and Metaphors of Identity" (pp. 210–20) is premised on Pound's "difficulty in being himself" and his well-documented "aversion to introspection"; "Pound is not interested in analyzing feelings, his or anyone else's." Personae, Rehder points out, can be used to hide from oneself as well as others, or to distance oneself from one's own feelings. In these terms The Cantos are "an unfinished autobiography by a man who resisted self-analysis and who tells his story by telling the story of other people." In a different vein Helen Dennis, "Ezra Pound and the Mask of Memory" (pp. 33–55), sees Pound's personae as "masks of memory." The first part of the essay reads the remarkable displacement of self in Pound's very early poetry via Lacan. In this work Dennis finds a sturdy "poetic paradigm" that lasts, its elements "the encounter with death, the trobar clus erotics of [End Page 154] desire turned...

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