Word: pound
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...Pound was 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...
...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...
...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...