On Ezra Pound

---------------------------------------(Ezra Pound was a flawed character.

His support for fascism led to his utter ruin.
However, he is one of the greatest poets of all time.
Here are some excerpts to help understand his life and work.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Christian virtues are there in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and
willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and
eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing went, it begins with a
livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and
rotten hypocrisy. Implicit there is Pounds judgment that in his world the Christian virtues were
not active in government.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------The criminal he wants to put away is the banking system which has usurped the power to create
credit and which exercises it for private profit and against the public interest. The confession was
made by William Paterson, one of the speculators who set up the Bank of England in 1694. In its
prospectus or charter. The Bank, he wrote, Hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it,
the bank creates out of nothing.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------The ideal becomes real only through action.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------His great idea (The Cantos) was a revival of American (western) culture.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The colours of the doctoral hood which the President then placed over Pounds head (in 1939)
were buff and blue, in commemoration, it is said, of the colours of the uniform of the American
Revolution.
But the revolution had been betrayed-was being betrayed- right then, it had seemed to Pound, in
Washington, in New York, at Yale and Harvard and Hamilton.
Even if he stood alone, perhaps all the more because he felt he stood alone, he would not give up
his fight for the revolutionary democratic idea. He would deploy such weapons as he had, words
in print, words in the air, words addressed from Italy to America out to the coming war.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P80.
The war at Troy lies behind the Cantos from the start as the archetypal instance of possession
leading to catastrophe. The intelligence to rise above possessiveness comes from being
mindful of the divinity in things, as Acoetes and Tiresias are mindful of Dionysos
P81. The story of honest virtue prospering by devoted saving and investing is aimed to show up
the respectable bankers. Here the tone is not comic. The bankers, whining over their 10% and
the hard times, represent the complacent greed that would enslave Dionysos:or, in modern
terms, the greed which changes producers into debt-slaves, and which restricts the distribution of
the abundance of nature, by charging excessive rates of interest and generally pursuing private
profit without regard for the common good.
P190.
A young Jewish Lutheran sculptor turned up broke in Rapallo in April 1934. This was Heinz
Clusmann (1906 -1975), who renamed himself Heinz Henghes. He wanted to see Pounds
Gaudiers (sculptors), and Pound took him in, fed him, put him up in what Laughlin described as
a large dog kennel on his roof-top terrace, found him some stone and tools from the cemetery
stone-cutter, and let him get to work. New sculptor loose on roof, and marble dust dappertuuto,
everywhere, Pound wrote by way of explaining the seal on the envelope of his letter to an
American college student. (He was telling her what her generation should be up to.) Henghes
had offered the seal, a little animal carving, to show what he could d; and had shown a drawing
of a seated centaur which later became the New Directions very Gaudier-like book colophon.
According to Laughlin, Pound persuaded Signora Agnelli, wife of the head of Fiat, to acquire
some of his first works at a good price, and Henghes went on to become a successful sculptor
and to win, after the war, prestigious commissions in London and New York.
P217.
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisy is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young mans courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
Between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATUREM (Against the natural order of things).

P218
(In Canto 46 now) He is no longer a searcher of archives, nor the preacher against usury. Now he
is a contemporary investigator and prosecutor of crime. He has been on the case for seventeen
years and longer, ever since he grasped what Douglas (Major Clifford Douglas, the founder of
Social Credit) was going on about in the New Age office in 1918, that is that the government can

create credit and distribute purchasing power to its people. He can see the crime, has the
evidence and a confession, but can he get the conviction.
The criminal he wants to put away is the banking system which has usurped the power to create
credit and which exercises it for private profit and against the public interest. The confession was
made by William Paterson, one of the speculators who set up the Bank of England in 1694, it its
prospectus or charter. The Bank, he wrote, Hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it,
the bank creates out of nothing.
P234.
The ideal becomes real only in action.
P237.
Dr Schacht had been charged even before September 1934 with the economic preparation of
Germany for war, and in a secret law of 21 May 1935 he was appointed Plenipotentiary-General
for War Economy. Everything in the economy was to be subordinated to the build-up towards
war, and it was that policy which brought about the reconstruction of Germany. In January 1933
there were 6 million unemployed-by 1937 there was full employment. The transformation was
effected by the state taking total control of credit and doing away with private banks and
Leihkapital (borrowed (meaning international) capital); by strict regulation of wages, prices and
dividends; by stat-financed public works-such as the new autobahen, designed for the rapid
deployment of armoured troops; and by the stimulation, regulation, and direction of both private
enterprise and the labour-force.
Schachts creation of credit in a country that had been effectively bankrupt by printing money at
need within a tightly controlled economy demonstrated that the Social Credit theory did work in
practice. That it was directed by a totalitarian dictator towards bringing on the hell of war, and
not at all towards the more just and more humane democracy and the Social Creditors dreamed
of, was another of the terrible contradictions of the time.
P246.
(He believed) Once the political situation is understood in terms of laissez-faire economics on
the one side, and state-controlled economics on the other, it becomes clear that in the one
freedom to vote went with having a very limited claim upon the state in respect of ones basic
human needs; whereas in the other state, while denying the individual a voice, did provide for the
basic needs of all who served it.
The free democracies though had a worm of contradiction at their core-the contradiction between
the spirit of democracy and the spirit of capitalism. From the founding principle of universal
equality should flow equal rights for all to a fulfilling life, and for that there must be government
of, by, and essentially for the good of the whole people. But capitalism does not favour the ideal
of the common wealth; and it rejoices it its freedom to use its accumulations of financial power
to shape societies to serve private ends..
Pound was not against democratic equality and social justice; he was against the subversion of
democracy by the injustices and inequalities of the capital system. But even his friends in

America and Britain had little patience with his claim that this was why he endorsed Mussolinis
Fascism. He was isolating himself and alienating a good many people by his singular idea of
how the disorders of the time might be put right.
P248.
What the Greek philosophers lacked was a sense of social responsibility, a feeling for the whole
people; and Christian thought was just as bad.. The sense of coordination, of the individual
in a milieu is not in them.
P249.
The (Chinese) characters read in this way, as visible signs rather than sounds, would serve, or so
Pound believed, as a door into a different modality of thought, into a different way of
perceiving and being in the world from that of western capitalism. It avoided the Western way of
thinking in abstractions and indefinite generalizations, and of speaking in words disconnected
from anything in particular and so conveying and effecting nothing in particular. The Chinese
written character abstracts or generalizes in the known concrete, it gives universal in the
particular, so spring is the sun under the bursting forth of plants, and male is rice field plus
struggle.. Written and read as a poetic language it preserves a direct experience of things and
persons as they are, not just in themselves but in their interactions, and that, in Pounds view, is
the basis of Confucian wisdom in government. It meant that at no point does the ConfusioMencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature, as European thought
has tended to. Because its intelligence was rooted in the total process of nature, it honoured all
that is alive and growing, and was for an economy of abundance. In government it accepted
responsibility for improving the whole social order-in Mencias words.
The Christian virtues are there in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and
willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and
eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing went, it begins with a
livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and
rotten hypocrisy. Implicit there is Pounds judgment that in his world the Christian virtues were
not active in government.
P271.
As Hitler was driving his people towards a criminal war which would devastate Europe morally
as much as materially, Pound was condensing into verse the epic story of how the civilization of
China was founded upon, and renewed itself dynasty after dynasty upon, the Confucian
conviction that good emperors brought peace and abundance for all their people, and that those
who did not would be rightly be overthrown. It was a simple enough ethic, this idea that the true
aim of government was to secure the welfare, liberty, and contentment of its citizens, and it had
serves China well through the vicissitudes of its 5,000 year history. According to its own
historians the empire flourished under good rulers, those who observed the processes of nature
and distributed its abundance equitably among the whole people; and under bad rulers, those
who went against the natural law or who let particular interests come before the common good,
the empire fell apart and the people suffered..

With the betrayal of the American revolution very much on his mind, and with Europe
descending into political chaos, Pound had written in 1937 of an immediate need for Confucius,
meaning specifically a need for his model of responsible government. He had done something
towards meeting the need by translating the Ta Hio and by making a digest of the Analects in
Guide to Kulchur. Then in the autumn of 1837 he bought the thirteen volume Histoire Generale
de la China (Paris, 1772 85), a translation of the Comprehensive Mirrors for the Aid of
Government made at the court of the Manchu emperor Kang Hsi by the French Jesuit JosephAnne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1889-1749). His China Cantos would be cantos having to
do with instruction the second part of his long poem as he had first conceived it at Hamilton
College in 1904 or 1905- and they would be addressed implicitly to the governments of Europe
and America, and in a few places directly to Italys Il Duce.
P284.
John Adams, in Pounds vision of him in cantos 62-71, was an exemplary governor, but more
than that, he was to America what Confucius was to China, the man who most enlightened and
formed the nascent mind of his nation. He did this, as Confucius and his followers had done it,
by gathering together, and digesting and refining into clear principles, the tradition of common
law and of natural law available to him; and by working out how the powers inherent in English
law could be made to serve the cause of American independence.
The clearest head in the congress
1774 and thereafter
pater patriae
the man who at certain points
made us
at certain points
saved us
by fairness, honesty and straight moving
Pounds part, as the poet of the cantos, is like that of the Confucian scholars who kept alive in
their own time and passed on to future generations the shaping idea of their civilization.
P287.
(After Adams) Then a new power arose, that of fund holders. This was the enemy within,
financial interests looking to profit from the banking system set up by Alexander Hamilton while
he was Washingtons secretary of the treasury(1789-95), a system modelled upon the Bank of
England and designed to allow the few fund holders or private bankers to profit the public credit
while accumulating perpetual debt to the nation..
These the betrayers, Pound thunders, meaning betrayers of the essential spirit of the American
Revolution, these the sifilides, the diseased spreaders of the contagion of money-lust. In his
judgement Hamiltons financial schemes had planted the evil of greed in the United States
financial system at its foundation.

P299.
His great idea was a revival of American culture as something specifically grown from a
nucleus of the American Founders. About February 1939 he isolated this nucleus in his
Introductory Text Book (in four chapters), each consisting of a single brief quotation from one of
the Founders. First was John Adams, attributing All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in
America to downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation, Next there was
Jeffersons statement of the right way to issue the national currency so that no interest on them
would be necessary or just. Then Lincolns and gave to the people of this Republic the
greatest blessing they ever had their own paper to pay their own debts. And finally, what had
become for Pound the foundation stone of the Republic, Article I Legislative Department,
section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, The Congress shall have power: To coin
money and regulate the value thereof . A note declared, The abrogation of this last
mentioned power derives from the ignorance mentioned in my first quotation.
Pound was urging in 1939 that those four quotations, as comprising the Fundamentals of
American politico-economic history, should be taught in all American Universities as the basis
of a true American culture. He wrote to his old teacher and friend at Hamilton, Joseph Darling
Ibbotson, I consider it utter treachery to any student, whether specializing in U. S. history or
economics to allow him to leave college ignorant of the issues raised in these four quotations.

P306.
Louis Zukofsky was at Serlys (New York City) on one occasion, and there was what Zukofosky
later termed, when Pound was on trial for treason, an exchange of frankness .This had
nothing to do with his (Zukifisky) being a Jew I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in
his presence, Zukofosky affirmed. It had to do with Pounds political action.
P309.
(In June1939) After spending the night with Willams Pound went up to Clinton In upper New
York State, to Hamilton College, his alma mater, where he would stay for nearly a week. The
College has asked if he would accept an honorary doctorate At the dignified academic ritual
in the College Chapel this citation, judicious and sympathetic summing up, had been read by the
Dean:
Ezra Pound: Native of Idaho, graduate of Hamilton College in the Class of 1905, poet, critic,
and prose writer of great distinction. Since completing your college career you have had a life
full of significance in the arts. You have found that you could work more happily in Europe than
in America and so have lived most of the past thirty years an expatriate making your home in
England, France and Italy, but your writings are known wherever English is read. Your feet have
taken paths, however, where the great reading public could give you few followers into
Provencal and Italian poetry, into Anglo-Saxon and Chinese. From all these excursions you have
brought back treasure. Your translations from the Chinese have, for example, led one of the most
gifted contemporary poets to call you the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. Your Alma
Mater, however, is an old lady, who has not always understood where you were going, gut she
has watched you with interest and pride if not always with understanding. The larger public has
also been at times amazed at you political and economic as well as your artistic credo, and you

have retaliated by making yourself not unintentionally perhaps, their gadfly. Your range of
interests is immense, and whether or not your theories of society survive, your name is
permanently linked with the development of English poetry in the twentieth century. Your
reputation is international, you have guided many poets into new paths, you have pointed new
directions, and the historian of the future in tracing the development of your growing mind will
inevitably, we are happy to think, be led to Hamilton and to the influence of your college
teachers. You have ever been a generous champion of younger writers as well as artists of other
fields, and for this fine and rare human quality and for your achievements in poetry and prose we
honour you.
The colours of the doctoral hood which the President then placed over Pounds head were buff
and blue, in commemoration, it is said, of the colours of the uniform of the American
Revolution. But the revolution had been betrayed-was being betrayed- right then, it had seemed
to Pound, in Washington, in New York, at Yale and Harvard and Hamilton. Even if he stood
alone, perhaps all the more because he felt he stood alone, he would not give up his fight for the
revolutionary democratic idea. He would deploy such weapons as he had, words in print, words
in the air, words addressed from Italy to America out to the coming war.
P330.
(Below a perfect example, according to Pound, of how bankers were dishonouring the spirit and
grace of the American Founding Fathers Constitution. An information circular 1863,
(unconfirmed), issued by a New York law firm outlining the benefits to its clients of investing
in banks, now being authorized under the new U.S. National Banking Act). Note: CMQ.
1863 Circular On Banking Act Benefits:
1. Any number of persons, not less than 5, may organize a National Banking Corporation.
2. Except in cities having 6,00 inhabitants or less, a national bank cannot have less than
$1,000,000 capital.
3. They are private corporations organized for private gain.
4. They are not subject to the control of state laws, except as Congress may from time to time
provide.
7. To start a national bank on the scale of $1,000,000 will require the purchase of that amount
(par value) of U. S. Government bonds.
8. U. S. Government bonds can now be purchased at 50% discount, so that a bank of $1,000,000
capital can be started at this time with only 500,000.
9. These bonds must be deposited with the U.S. treasurer at Washington, as security for the
national bank currency, that on the making of the deposit will be furnished by the government to
the bank.

10. The U.S. government will pay 6% interest on the bonds, in gold, the interest being paid semiannually. It will be seen that at the present price of bonds, the interest paid by the government,
will of itself amount to 12% in gold, on all the money invested.
11. The U.S. Government, under the provisions of the national banking act, on having the bonds
aforesaid deposited with its treasurer, will on the strength of such security, furnish national
currency to the bank depositing the bonds to the amount of 90% of the face of the bonds, at an
annual interest of only ONE PER CENT PER ANNUM. Thus the deposit of 1,000,000 will
secure the issue of $900,000 in currency.
13. The demand for money is so great that this currency can be readily loaned to the people
across the counter of the bank at a discount at the rate of 10% at 30 to 60 days time, making
about 12% interest on the currency.
14. The interest on the bonds, plus the interest on the currency which the bonds secure, plus the
incidentals of the business ought to make the gross earnings of the bank amount to 28% to 33
per cent. The amount of the dividends that may be declared will depend largely on the salaries
the officers of the bank vote themselves, and the character and rental charges of the premises
occupied by the bank as a place of business. In case it is thought that the showing of profits
should not appear too large, the now common plan of having the directors buy the bank building
and then raise the rent and the salaries of the president and cashier may be adopted.
15. National banks are privileged to either increase or contract their circulation at will and, of
course, can grant or withhold loans as they may see fit. As the banks have a national
organization, and can easily act together in withholding loans or extending time, it follows that
they can by united in refusing to make loans, cause a stringency in the money market and in a
single week or even in a single day cause a decline in all the products of the country. The
tremendous possibilities of speculation involved in this control of the money in a country like the
United States, will at once be understood by all bankers.
16. National banks pay no taxes on their bonds, nor on their capital, nor on their deposits. This
exemption from taxation is based on the theory that the capital of these banks is invested in U.S.
securities, and is a remarkable permission of the law.

Source:
Ezra Pound: Poet
A Portrait of the Man & His Work Vol. II.
A. David Moody.
Oxford University Press 2014.

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