Ezra Pound - Lone Ant from the Broken Anthill
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, this flamboyant and outspoken expatriate had had the temerity to criticise President Roosevelt's foreign policy, accusing him of crimes against humanity. He had also vehemently complained that America never should've gone to war. Roosevelt and his henchmen, he had claimed, were little more than "front men"; paid political stooges serving the interests of bankers and arms dealers - mostly Jews. Pound upbraided those in power for using Pearl Harbour in the interest of the kikes. "If Roosevelt and his jews or the jews and their Roosevelt had been defeated in the last election, the United States never would've gone to war," he said.
Such opinions found little sympathy in America, and after the revelations of Treblinka, Aushwitz and Dachau, were downright damnable. But it was not anti-semitism, but treason, which Pound was charged with.
In 1945, at the age of fifty-nine, the American poet was arrested by Italian partisans and turned over to the U.S. Army in northern Italy. Confined in a military detention center in Pisa, Pound spent his first weeks living in a cage the size of a dog kennel. His health began to deteriorate, and eventually he was moved into a tent near the camp hospital where he waited for nearly six months for the authorities to decide what they were going to do with him. In November, he was flown to the United States and handed over to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
Had there been a trial, Pound - like William Joyce and others - probably would've been found guilty and executed. Pound, for his part, was unrepentant. He didn't believe he had done anything wrong; he was, he said, merely trying to save the Constitution.
Pound's pilgrimage to Europe in 1908 and his support for Mussolini and Italian fascism thirty years later are often cited as clear evidence of Pound's rejection of America and American democracy, but such a judgement in simplistic and does not take account of the facts, facts that have been ignored by those who see in Pound's anti-semitic proclamations more than just-cause for writing him and his poetry off as politically unsound. Clement Greenberg voiced the concerns of many critics and writers when he wrote: "Life includes and is more important than art. I am sick of the art of adoration that prevails among cultured people... that art silliness which condones almost any moral or intellectual failing on the artist's part so long as he is or seems to be a successful artist. It is still justifiable to demand that he be a successful human being before anything else."
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