Ezra Pound Controversy - Barry Goldensohn (essay date June 1986)
Barry Goldensohn (essay date June 1986)
SOURCE: Goldensohn, Barry. “Pound and Antisemitism.” Yale Review 75, no. 3 (June 1986): 399-421.
[In the following essay, Goldensohn disagrees with the various rationales often given for Pound's anti-Semitism and that despite the historical tendencies to forgive and forget such indiscretions, Pound's anti-Semitism continues to matter.]
It is a puzzling and painful conflict for one who loves Pound's poetry and poetics and admires his role as a generous mentor of poets to attempt to come to terms with his antisemitism, his Fascism, and his glorification of Mussolini (the “Boss”) and Hitler (“a Jeanne d'Arc”).1 We do not have here a romantic figure of the artist-in-defiance choosing evil or crime like Genet, Rimbaud, or Sade; nor on the other hand do we have here the poet as mass murderer like Sir Walter Ralegh, who in a “pacification campaign” in Ireland is said to have...
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