"To act on one's definition": Ezra Pound, Carl Schmitt, and the Poetics of Sovereignty

"I don't believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions" (Jefferson and/or Mussolini 33). Ezra Pound's description of Mussolini as an "artifex"—a master craftsman or artist—encapsulates a central and longstanding problem in Pound's work: the relationship between his avant-garde poetics and his active engagement in fascist political projects. Of course, this issue is not unique to Pound. Scholars of modernism have long debated the connection between canonical high-modernist aesthetics and the authoritarian political leanings of many of its major authors. The question still stands, however: what made fascism attractive to these authors, and what implications does this tendency toward authoritarianism have for modernist aesthetics? Specifically, what is the connection between Ezra Pound's poetic and political activities?

This essay seeks to address these questions by focusing on Pound's inter-war nonfiction prose—specifically pieces considered to be either influential statements of modernist poetics or representative samples of his critical writing. I read these texts alongside the work of Carl Schmitt, focusing on his theory of sovereignty. After a brief summary of the theoretical debate surrounding the relationship between politics and aesthetics, I outline Schmitt's definition of sovereignty and the relationship between a sovereign's power and his use of language. Using Schmitt as a theoretical framework, I then turn to Pound's early articulations of the role of the artist and the implications of that role on his creation of a paratactic poetic style. Pound continues to explore the role of the artist and the value of parataxis throughout his career, and I trace the connections between these two concerns, focusing specifically on his 1930s prose. Finally, I argue that Pound's articulation of aesthetic problems in terms of sovereignty transitions seamlessly into his political writing and eventual support of fascist dictators like Mussolini. By using Schmitt's work to explicate Pound's, I also hope to demonstrate the relevance of Schmitt's judicial theory to literary studies and provide a framework for further investigations of the political implications of modernist poetics. Throughout the essay, I will use the terms "modernism" or "canonical modernism" to denote the work of the modernist authors of Pound's circle, including T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, and others.²

Because of his central role in establishing canonical modernist poetics and his well-known support for Italian fascism, Pound has been at the center of the debate over the connection between aesthetic and political modernism. Some early scholarship attempted to separate the two realms entirely. Describing the scholarly attempt to salvage Pound's poetics from the wreckage of his political commitments, David Barnes argues that early polarized accounts of Pound tended to either marginalize his political engagement or explain it in over-simplified terms, in both cases keeping it away from his cultural/esthetic activities: "In the popular account of Pound, a split emerged between the early radical modernist Pound and his reactionary, Fascist successor" (Barnes 20). Yet this explanation has proven largely unsatisfactory. As Matthew Feldman argues, the "self-serving conceit that modernism was somehow inured from ideological extremism" and the insistence on "conceive[ing] modernism in purely aesthetic terms" failed to account for much of Pound's output (Feldman ix).

More recently, many scholars have explored the connections between fascist politics and the modernist aesthetics of artists living throughout Europe.³ In Pound scholarship specifically, Barnes has argued that the "difficulty of separating political and esthetic questions within the Poundian universe" necessitates that those works representing Pound's "propagandistic drive" must be understood "in relationship to the development of Pound's larger poetic project" (Barnes 20). Many scholars have worked to explicate Pound's economic and political theories, while others have explored the political and racial themes of the Cantos.⁴ While it is generally accepted that Pound's political and poetic interests mutually influenced...