Ezra Pound and Mussolini in Fascist Italy

The Author of the Cantos and His Role in Fascism During II World War

Sep 18, 2009

Ezra Pound is one of the most eminent American poets, but for his collaboration with Mussolini Pound spent 12 years in a criminal hospital in Washington.

Ezra Pound lived in a century in which art and politics had a close link. His admiration for Italian Fascism affected the judgment of his work for long time, as happened with other great authors like Picasso, Brecht and Neruda for the left side, Borges and Celine, for the right.

The poet wrote his Pisan Cantos in an American military prison, in a cage of cement and iron, on a rustic table made in secret by his jail companion, possibly an African-American soldier. The image evoked is that of an ancient Guantanamo, with the sun over the prisoner’s head.

The Italian poet Mario Luzi remembers the tragic obstinacy of Pound on the day of his arrest in May 1945. Luzi spoke of the arrest, describing Pound as a man who did not want to escape from his responsibility. Pound declared in front of the FBI officials that if a man is not willing to take some risks for his ideas then the ideas or perhaps the man himself has no value.

Pound paid the price to be the product of a terrible century. In 1967 Ezra broke his silence regarding his past, saying to Allen Ginsberg that he was victim of a hurricane that destroyed generations of Europeans, created by ideologies and ended with a horrible war. Pound added: “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."

Ezra Pound Joins Fascism

"Beauty is difficult", wrote Ezra Pound, but it is even more difficult to understand how a genius of poetry tried to bring together Thomas Jefferson and Mussolini. Pound surely considered himself a patriot. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the poet attempted to return to the USA, but the American Embassy refused him entry.

His obsession against usury and the powerful elite of Wall Street brought him really close to Fascist economic politics but also to anti-Semitism. Pound believed, as the American Constitution affirmed, that only Congress should have been guardian of the coin. The poet assumed that to assign this role to a central bank and to the financial markets was an abjuration of the People’s sovereignty.

In his writings such as ABC of Economics (1933), Social Credit, What is Money for? (1935), Pound described bank managers as sharks. Wall Street, Banks and the decline of American democracy under Franklin Delano Roosevelt were the preferred matter of Ezra. The President, in Pound’s opinion, was the closest approximation of a dictatorship in American history.

On the contrary, Mussolini, also in the Italian Social republic of 1943-1945, appeared to the poet far from capitalist corruption. In 1933 Pound had a meeting with Mussolini, outlining his ideas for monetary reform. Pound contemplated Italy as the land where his economic ideas could be realized. In 1939 he came back to the USA with the intent to speak to the President in order to avoid a war against Italy.

Some years after the end of the war, the poet affirmed that his intent was to educate Mussolini. Giuseppe Prezzolini, an Italian writer who lived in fascist Italy and in the USA thereafter, asserted that “uncle Ez” knew less about fascism than the fascists knew about the poet. Fascists never considered Pound as a potential policy maker, they just regarded him as a part of the propaganda against enemies.

Pound started his collaboration with the regime writing and, most importantly, offered his services as a radio broadcaster. "Europe calling, Ezra Pound speaking..." was the radio tribune from where Pound defended the beloved Mussolini against the despised President Roosevelt, the Jewish bankers, capitalism and the domain of the financial market.

Death in Venice

After 12 years in the hospital for the criminally insane of St. Elizabeth's, his trial for treason never commenced, Ezra Pound was declared not dangerous, but still sick, and was freed thanks also to the help of old friends like Hemingway, Elliot and Frost.

Pound decided to come back to Italy. On the mountain of South Tirol, in Castel Fontana, the middle age castle of Brunneburg of 1241, that looks “just like Tibet”, Pound settled for years and wrote, Let the Wind Speak. The American poet died in Venice in 1972 in a room full of flowers and with a wonderful view of the Venice Laguna. Few friends were with him during the trip to the cemetery island of San Michele.

As in one of his preferred poems, La Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, Pound had his hell during the war, his purgatory in the criminal hospital and his Paradise in Venice.

James J. Wilhelm: Ezra Pound - The Tragic Years 1925-1972, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994

Ezra Pound: Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L'Idea Statale, Fascism as I Have Seen It, New York: Stanley Nott Ltd., 1936

The copyright of the article Ezra Pound and Mussolini in Fascist Italy in Modern US History is owned by Alessandro Mastrorocco. Permission to republish Ezra Pound and Mussolini in Fascist Italy in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.