[In the following essay, Chace analyzes Pound's 1938 prose treatise A Guide to Kulchur, particularly its anti-Semitism.]

And if you will say that this tale teaches …
a lesson, or that the Reverend Eliot
has found a more natural language … you who think you will
get through hell in a hurry …

These words open Canto 46. Written in late 1935 or early 1936, the canto is at once a short review of Ezra Pound's beliefs up to that time and an announcement that the modern Inferno in which he as a poet has dwelt has not yet ended. The grasp of history is strong. The test of a man is his ability to endure the contemporary hell contrived by usurers and, moreover, to so describe its shape and feel that the preciseness of his description will serve the struggle of all others so imprisoned.¹ The Odyssean travail will at last become success if sanity and knowledge are preserved. As Pound puts it in Canto 47:

Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!
This sound came in the dark
First must thou go the road
                                                                                                                        to hell
And to the bower of Ceres' daughter Proserpine,
Through overhanging dark, to see Tiresias,
Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell
So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he,
Ere thou come to thy road's end.
                                                  Knowledge the shade of a shade,
Yet must thou sail after knowledge

The road's end is knowledge, the means is fortitude. There are, we also see, shortcuts through hell, but they are all avenues cheaply taken. They would make less of Pound's “tale,” his Cantos, by thinking of them as a poem yielding no more than a “lesson,” a schoolboy's homily. The Cantos are instead, we infer, a means of educing from the vastness of history an ideal culture, a total configuration of the mind against which the detritus that is modern “civilization” may be judged. In these terms the struggle of men like Mussolini may be evaluated and, in the course of things, praised. To scant that most useful configuration would indeed be to speed through hell, for the main task of a man trapped in the contemporary turmoil we know surrounds us would thereby be avoided.

Another way to scant hell is to believe that T. S. Eliot “has found a more natural language.” Pound's ire in this canto seems directed not so much at his former ally in matters aesthetic and poetic, but at those who were discovering in the Eliot of the mid-1930's what they believed was a means of transcending history. Perhaps, they thought, religious affirmation could lift one out of the imprisonment of time and into a station secure beyond flux. The degree to which Eliot was himself exploring such a possibility is indicated by “Burnt Norton” and by some of his discussion in After Strange Gods (1934). But Eliot's answers are no answers at all to the Odyssean man, says Pound. Moreover, those who believe that Eliot had found a more natural language are just as wrong as those who believe that Pound's long poem can be dismissed as a homiletic lesson. It is he himself, in fact, who employs the more natural language, for he is sensitive, as Eliot is not, to the demand that poetic language in their day be a language of rage, of bitterness, of arousal to complete transformation. Whereas Eliot seeks stasis, Pound seeks indictment and change. He condemns pandemic usury and advocates a society inspired by Jefferson, modulated by Confucian precepts, and heedful of the changes Mussolini had already brought into being in one country.

Canto 46 can be seen as a review of Pound's beliefs and of his activities, along with those of others, in gathering evidence for his indictment and promoting change:

                                                                      … nineteen
Years on this case, CRIME
Ov two CENturies, 5 millions bein' killed off
to 1919, and before that
Debts of the South to New York, that is to the
banks of the city, two hundred million,
war, I don't think (or have it your own way …)
about slavery?
                                                                      Seventeen years on the case; here
Gents, is/are the confession.
                                        “Can we take this into court?
                    “Will any jury convict on this evidence?
1694 anno domini, on through the ages of usury
On, right on, into hair-cloth, right on into rotten building,
Right on into London houses, ground rents, foetid brick work,
Will any jury convict 'um? The Foundation of Regius Professors
Was made to spread lies and teach Whiggery, will any
                                        JURY convict 'um?
The Macmillan Commission about two hundred and forty years
                                                                                                                                                      LATE
with great difficulty got back to Paterson's
The bank makes it ex nihil
Denied by five thousand professors, will any
Jury convict 'um? This case, and with it
The first part, draws to a conclusion(2)

Before concluding the case, however, Pound first criticizes Marx for not knowing, as he should have, what Pound now knows. Pound implies that it is to the credit of his system of ideogrammic analysis, an analysis unencumbered by theoretical consistency, that it can detect the one crucial element in economics, the cancer of usury. Pound then lashes out at Great Britain's and America's failure during the Depression with a rhetoric many Marxists would gladly have employed:

                                                                      … Mr Marx, Karl, did not
foresee this conclusion, you have seen a good deal of
the evidence, not knowing it evidence, is monumentum
look about you, look, if you can, at St Peter's
Look at the Manchester slums, look at Brazilian coffee
or Chilean nitrates. …
Hic Geryon est. Hic hyperusura.
FIVE million youths without jobs
FOUR million adult illiterates
15 million ‘vocational misfits’, that is with small chance for jobs
NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial accidents
One hundred thousand violent crimes. The Eunited States ov America
3rd year of the reign of F. Roosevelt, signed F. Delano, his uncle.
CASE for the prosecution.

This, then, is Pound's “case,” circa 1936, against the net of usury hemming him in. The case was still being prosecuted in Guide to Kulchur (1938),³ the prose complement of the Cantos, sharing with the poem the problems of apparently random juxtaposition as a method. Its fascinations and difficulties are, in part, those of the Cantos.

It provides one of the best introductions to Pound and to the landscape of his mind. That landscape is dense with good civilizations and bad, good art and usury-ravaged art, good men and bankers, proper and improper ways of nourishing society. The Guide includes the Poundian secularized equivalents of heaven and hell, and it delineates as clearly as anything he wrote those forces of justice and injustice that for a quarter-century defined his conception of politics. The Guide also reveals Pound taking his favorite stance, that of the teacher whose learning, delivered up like so much hard-grained buckshot, invites the student either to stand aside or to join the attack upon the myriad enemies of “straight-thinking.” Disagreement is out of the question. His manner is not only informal, abrupt, and at times strangely avuncular; it is also the manner of a man who confidently assumes that his answers to the problems of the world will have a validity denied to mere experts.⁴ In an age of experts, his casual presumptions have the charm of rarity, and partially explain why the Guide, with all its faults, is an engaging work. The spectacle of a man speaking out his whole mind on every imaginable issue, with no regard for the enabling apparatus of formal learning, is worth looking at.

It incorporates, helter-skelter, most of the elements to be found in Pound's earlier work: belief in nature's bounty, concern with the obligations of the serious artist, dedication to monetary reform, anti-leftist attitudes, loyalty to Mussolini, and beliefs about the relationship of usury to bad art. Devoted to what it calls “The New Learning,” it is unified by being composed, as Pound himself says, of “notes toward a totalitarian treatise” (GK 27). It also benefits from tension between old, acquired stubbornnesses and fresh visions, a desire to achieve a new alertness and reappraise old judgments (“Renovate, dod gast you, renovate,” as he said on another occasion). Much of that tension is lost, of course, on readers who have not followed Pound through his previous attempts to back politics into a corner. Such readers may write off the Guide as freakish and opaque. But other readers may note that it shows both zeal (in its frank authoritarianism and its virulence against “demo-liberal ideology”) and modesty, referring to its author as a “fanatic,” a “credit-crank,” and as someone whose writing has already suffered from being “coloured” by his convictions (GK 93, 182, 195).

Moreover, Pound's aesthetic approach to totalitarianism is original and intrinsically interesting. Describing his own plight as a mature artist who is disengaged from the culture surrounding him, Pound explains that such a condition occurs only in cultures that have not yet realized the obvious advantages of an authoritarian melding of individual and milieu. He argues that true culture begins, not with mere knowledge, but with knowledge perfectly integrated with deed and sensibility. It begins, he says, “when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book’” (GK 134) and can go about one's business without conscious reference to the cultural environment. The marooned artist, forced to create his own entirely personal and idiosyncratic world, is proof positive that his society has mal-functioned. To illustrate the difference between the artist who must flee or wage war against his society and the artist embraced by his society, Pound contrasts Béla Bartók (and himself) on the one hand and Luigi Boccherini on the other. The efforts of the first are marred by “the defects inherent in a record of struggle,” while in the achievements of the other “no trace of effort remained” (GK 135). As Davie has suggested, Pound believes that art in a totalitarian society will be “simple and transparent,”⁵ qualities issuing naturally from a situation in which the artist will always be able to find a clean, well-lighted place.

The artist will no longer be a pariah; his work will gain respect among a people in whom a sense of future possibility will urge the acceptance of every man's skills. As in almost every utopia, however, the idle, the trivial, and the merely elegant will be offered no room. As Pound applies these criteria, Plato and Aristotle, the other Athenian Greeks, “the Hebrews,” most Protestants, most economists, and all Englishmen would be excluded.

Pound's enmity toward Plato, whom he calls a “purple swine,” and Aristotle, whom he calls a “dhirty greek” (GK 327), is based on his conviction that these men, although usually considered good “professors of philosophy,” are in essence dilettantes or faddists. In contrast to Confucius, who presides god-like over much of Pound's thinking,⁶ they are not basically concerned with the good of the whole society, nor do they consider how right thought can issue in right action, embracing with one clear motion the interlocking duties of man, family, and state. And neither philosopher, of course, had thought sufficiently about money and interest. Dwelling on the sublime and outlining in the air an elegant but irrelevant dream (The Republic), Plato forgot man. Full of “imbecilities” and “yatter” (The Nichomachean Ethics), Aristotle left little worth saving and, with his many abstractions, brought more trouble than relief. “The greek philosophers,” Pound states, “did not feel communal responsibilities. … The sense of coordination, of the individual in a milieu is not in them” (GK 38). Heir to the Enlightenment and to Confucian anti-transcendentalism,⁷ Pound sees nothing but danger in the “fantasies” of Plato and in the “academic” systems of Aristotle. His sole criticism of Mussolini in the Guide is that his mind contains “an Aristotelic residuum” (GK 309).

Aristotelian flaw or no, Mussolini is precisely the kind of political figure that must be admired by anyone interested in the translation of thought into action and in the virtues of orderly form: “Mussolini a great man, demonstrably in his effects on event, unadvertisedly so in the swiftness of mind, in the speed with which his real emotion is shown in his face” (GK 105). Devotion to form is a quality of mind also characteristic of Hitler, and it is in the tone of one connoisseur praising another that Pound refers to the coup d'éclat of his old friend Wyndham Lewis (GK 134): “Form-sense 1910 to 1914. 15 or so years later Lewis discovered Hitler. I hand it to him as a superior perception. Superior in relation to my own ‘discovery’ of Mussolini.”

The appreciation is an aesthetic one. Pound fixes his attention, not on the uses of power, or on the results of these uses, but on what he calls “the forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet” (GK 152). Mussolini's concept of a new Italy is seen as a beautiful rose, an image that ignores the force required to impose this concept on the country. From here it is not far to Mussolini's son remarking the beauty rather than the death in bombs exploding over Ethiopia, and we are reminded that true barbarity may issue as easily from order as from disorder. Horror begins when aesthetic order is separated from its human content.

These reflections may color but should not obscure our view of Pound here. In contrast to Mussolini, a force liberating new thought and the previously dormant energies of Italy, stand “those who petrify thought, that is KILL it, as the Marxists have tried to in our time, and as countless other fools and fanatics have tried to in all times” (GK 277). One way to kill thought is to trample on subtle distinctions, to smear differences. That is what usury does—it is antithetical to sense discriminations and thus, in discouraging the development of the perceptive faculties, encourages ignorance. Protestantism (or puritanism) has offended as grossly in this way as has usury or Marxism, and is equally scorned (GK 185):

The puritan is a pervert, the whole of his sense of mental corruption is squirted down a single groove of sex. The scale and proportion of evil, as delimited in Dante's hell (or the catholic hell) was obliterated by the Calvinist and Lutheran churches. I don't mean to say that these heretics cut off their ideas of damnation all at once, suddenly or consciously, I mean that the effect of Protestantism has been semiticly to obliterate values, to efface grades and graduations.

Here we can see that just as feelings against usury or Marxism lead Pound immediately to feelings against Protestants, so feelings against Protestants lead him immediately to feelings against those who behave “semiticly.” Pound's anti-Semitism has thus apparently developed since Patria Mia, wherein the Jew is portrayed simply as one who adheres to the values of the “nickel-plated cash register.” Here, many years later, the Jew (“the Hebrew”) is cited specifically as something much worse, as the chief obstacle to clear thinking. The entire history of the Jews has been inimical to rational values (GK 330): “Nothing cd. be less civil, or more hostile to any degree of polite civilization than the tribal records of the hebrews. There is not a trace of civilization from the first lies of Genesis up to the excised account of Holophernes.” This variety of anti-Semitism⁸ comports most appropriately with the kind of anti-communism prompted by Father Charles Coughlin, who is mentioned favorably several times in the Guide. “Communism,” says Pound, “with its dictatorship of the proletariat is merely barbarous and Hebrew, and it is on a level with primitive theocracies” (GK 270-71).

Some further discussion of the precise nature of Pound's anti-Semitism is in order here. At times it seems merely that Pound is enraged at a certain general mode of thought and behavior but must, in accordance with his habitual procedures, give it a specific designation—here “Hebrew.” It is as if Pound, suddenly realizing that he, adamant against abstractions, was using abstractions, decided to obscure that fact by a sudden infusion of intemperance.⁹ At other times, and within this same work, Pound can suddenly relent and even speak decisively against racial prejudice. It is, he says, a “red herring. The tool of the man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician. No one will deny that the jews have racial characteristics, better and worse ones. … It is nonsense for the anglo-saxon to revile the jew for beating him at his own game” (GK 242-43).

This same ambivalence appears in Cantos 35 and 52:

this is Mitteleuropa
                                        and Tsievitz
has explained to me the warmth of affections,
the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of
hebrew affections, in the family, and nearly everything else. …
pointing out that Mr Lewinesholme has suffered by deprivation
of same and exposure to American snobbery … “I am a product,”
said the young lady, “of Mitteleuropa,”
but she seemed to have been able to mobilize
and the fine thing was that the family did not
wire about papa's death for fear of disturbing the concert
which might seem to contradict the general indefinite wobble.
It must be rather like some internal organ,
some communal life of the pancreas … sensitivity
without direction … this is …
                              Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews
                                                            or yr / grand children will curse you
                              jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek
                              also super-neschek or the international racket

The first of these passages is primarily a view of the exotic, an evocation of the atmosphere of intriguing situations. If it attacks anything, it attacks “the general indefinite wobble,” loosely translatable as ambiguity, something Pound had been hammering away at for many years. Pound's hatred for the wobble, as his many diatribes indicate, cuts across all racial lines.

The passage from Canto 52 is an altogether different matter. There Pound has, to borrow one of his own disturbing phrases, “localized the infection,” and he abandons accurate description in favor of fierce denunciation. Making use of the anti-Semitism spuriously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, he indulges his baroque penchant for name-calling—the “big jews,” the “chazims” (probably his distortion of the Hebrew word “hazirim,” meaning “pigs”)—in an unmistakably direct attack.

Repelled as even the initiated reader of Pound must be by such a passage, and certain as he may be that it jars hopelessly with the quiet grace of the rest of the canto,¹⁰ he can scarcely be surprised. Blaming the Jews for all the ills of civilization is not only already familiar from Pound's earlier works, but perfectly consistent with his predilection for single and specific causes. In order to sidestep what he calls “the pimps' paradise of indefinite verbiage” (GK 324), and in order to institute the new synthesis, the totalitarian, Pound directed the enormous fund of his eccentric learning and research through the strait gates of anti-Semitism. As he says, “some kind of line to hang one's facts on is better than no line at all” (GK 221). If the line gives him a means of explaining, without reference to anything so indeterminate as “human frailty” or so intangible as “original sin,” the unending maladies of civilization, then it has served its purpose well. As Pound says in the Guide to Kulchur (p. 189), “there is no use in blaming the mass of humanity.” It is quite sufficient, and far more efficacious, to blame the Jews.

All this is not to say that his anti-Semitic remarks are arbitrarily made to advance his argument. His strategies are never contrived or duplicitous; we cannot doubt the sincerity of his feelings against Jews. We are obliged, however, to note that Pound's anti-Semitism and the literary uses to which he repeatedly puts it may be evaluated most productively as an altogether logical corollary to his philosophical and aesthetic principles, not as an inexplicable divergence from them.

The decisive tone of the Guide, in perfect keeping with the authoritarian philosophies Pound favored at the time, falters at several crucial points. Interestingly enough, they are all in passages dealing with religious sentiments. We know how often and with what fervor he could refer to “the unquenchable splendour and indestructible delicacy of nature” (GK 282). But his praise of nature, his devotion to her bounty, his apostrophes to the world as made possible by Demeter, Aphrodite, and Artemis, were never meant to be understood as mere materialism. For all of Pound's affinity for “the real” as he saw it, and for all of his scorn of foggy mental life, he harbored religious feelings that buoy up even some of his crassest political judgments.

Occasionally these feelings appear to be no more than a form of pragmatism: “Without gods, no culture. Without gods, something is lacking. Some Stoics must have known this, and considered logic a mere shell outside the egg.” Occasionally those feelings appear to be something else, something higher: “I repeat: this view repudiates materialism. It is volitionism.” And occasionally Pound toys with the overwhelming prospect of the Catholic Church: “Again I repeat: I cd. be quite a ‘good catholic’ IF they wd. let me pick my own saints and theologians” (GK 126, 189). But these circumnavigations of a problem that must have been in the forefront of his mind are, late in Guide to Kulchur, abruptly abandoned in favor of a more direct attack, when, in reviewing the legacy of Victorian belief, he comments that the Victorians “bred a generation of experimenters, my generation, which was unable to work out a code for action. We believed and disbelieved ‘everything,’ or to put it another way we believed in the individual case.”

The best of us accepted every conceivable “dogma” as a truth for a situation, as the truth for a particular crux, crisis or temperament.

And a few serious survivors of war grew into tolerance of the “new synthesis.”

(GK 291)

Pound, of course, immediately places himself among those “best.” And among those “few serious survivors of war,” he had since 1918 seen that his task was to construct that “new synthesis.” At times that synthesis might seem entirely made up of C. H. Douglas, Wörgl, Mussolini, anti-Semitism, and praise for the Monte dei Paschi. But at other times (GK 295-99) he reveals there is more. After discussing Victorians, he admits that:

the foregoing pp. are as obscure as anything in my poetry. I mean or imply that certain truth exists. Certain colours exist in nature though great painters have striven vainly, and though the colour film is not yet perfected. Truth is not untrue'd by reason of our failings to fix it on paper. … I assert that the Gods exist.

That the gods do exist, that a poet may fail of describing them; that certain truth also exists yet may never wholly be apprehended; and that a new religious sensibility must comprehend a world beyond individual cases—on these foundations stand Pound's religious convictions. Guide to Kulchur moves too brutally fast for those convictions to be understood clearly. And perhaps Pound found the confessional, or inspirational, mode in which his attitudes would have to be described too embarrassing to stay with for very long. Those attitudes are nevertheless there.

In their idiosyncrasy, they explain the temper that flares against Eliot in Guide to Kulchur. It is precisely Eliot's religion, or his religiosity, that angers Pound. It is not simply that Eliot's church is an English church, and that England is hypocritical and stultifying. It is also that Eliot allows his religious feelings to “thrive” in an atmosphere poisonous to any true mental or spiritual invention. No new synthesis could ever issue from England, much less from its church: “no intellectual curiosity in any anglican publication” (GK 301). In the patronizing tone that was increasingly to characterize Pound's comments about Eliot as the 1930's progressed, Pound says, “Thoughts After Lambeth one of Eliot's most creditable essays. I wonder who suggested it? But J. H.'s criticism ‘lot of dead cod about a dead god’ quite just as describing a good deal of T. S. E.'s activity” (Ibid.).

Only one year after the appearance of Guide to Kulchur, Pound condemned Eliot's somewhat racist After Strange Gods, about which he stated, mirabile dictu: “Eliot, in this book, has not come through uncontaminated by the Jewish poison.”¹¹ This kind of anti-Semitism grew cruder, and more compulsive, as Europe sank into the barbarism of World War II. The war years were, of course, the years of Pound's broadcasts on shortwave Rome Radio.¹² On the basis of these broadcasts, he was indicted for treason by the United States government; more severe than the government, his peers and their heirs indict him still. Pound's poetic reputation may never exist independently. Nor, I think, should it so exist.

It is difficult to be objective about those broadcasts, but they can be considered a demotic expression of what Pound had been saying for years. The subjects remain the same. The opinions are the old opinions. Pound sees old-fashioned “Yankee” independence and craftsmanship everywhere on the wane (broadcasts of April 30 and May 9, 1942):

Why did our Colonial architecture, what is called our Colonial architecture[,] go to pot? Wood carving, Colonial cabinet making, I mean furniture making, not digging holes and knots, why did that go to pot? American [silversmiths'] technique, why did it peter out? Why do such things synchronize with other phenomena, such as usury tolerance[,] tolerance of usury?

No second rating cooking ever heated my face, till I got to eating in restaurants when going to college. And even then, God damn it, an oyster stew was an oyster stew. I mean as [to] cooking, we were second to no man and to no woman of any nation. French chefs were more fancy, but ice cream made of cream, all cream and peaches, solid peaches, were not surpassed by Theodore; it was not distinctive of Europe.

Certain specific references, however, are new: those to “the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers,” to “Franklin Finklestein Roosevelt,” to “kikes,” “sheenies,” and “the oily people.” Also new are Pound's commendation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the most notorious of contemporary tracts purportedly revealing a Jewish or Zionist plot against the foundations of Western civilization) and his remarks that history is “keenly analyzed” in Mein Kampf.

Pound implied, as have many anti-Semites, that Jews are a “rootless” people: “The Jew is a savage, his psychology is … may the stink of your camp drive you onward—herders—having no care but to let their … herds grouse and move onward when the pasture is exhausted” (May 11, 1943). He spoke against America's involvement in the war on May 28, 1942:

And every hour that you go on with this war is an hour lost to you and to your children. And every sane act you commit is committed in [homage] to Mussolini and Hitler. Every reform, every lurch towards the just price, toward the control of a market is an act of [homage] to Mussolini and Hitler.

About the killing of Jews, he had this to say on March 30, 1942:

Don't start a pogrom. That is[,] not an old style killing of small Jews. That system is no good, whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a [pogrom] up at the top, I repeat that, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top, there might be something to say for it. But on the whole, legal measures are preferable. The 60 kikes who started this war might be sent to St. Helena, as a measure of world [prophylaxis], and some hyper-kikes or non-Jewish kikes along with them.

There is perhaps only a clinical explanation for such utterances. They issue from an anger gone far beyond reason, from a desperation grown extreme. Pound's daughter writes of his condition then:

He was losing ground, I now see, losing grip on what most specifically he should have been able to control, his own words.

lord of his work and master of utterance¹³—

—he was that no longer. And perhaps he sensed it and the more strongly clung to the utterances of Confucius, because his own tongue was tricking him, running away with him, leading him into excess, away from his pivot, into blind spots.¹⁴

Yet neither this explanation nor the fact that American varieties of anti-Semitism increased substantially in general during World War II¹⁵ has helped Pound's reputation. His words have for once had the power he always maintained they had, haunting him until his death and even beyond.

Notes

1. The black poet LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), a writer artistically indebted to Pound, has said of the black artist: “His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness.” Home, Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), p. 251.

2. This canto is one of the few dealt with at any length by Pound in his radio broadcasts from Rome. He apparently thought seriously enough of it to give it his undivided attention during the broadcast of February 12, 1942 (see transcript available at the Library of Congress). For some six years, then, it had held his attention.

3. (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1952). Originally published in 1938 by Faber and Faber and New Directions, this work was to have been called “Kulch,” or Ez' Guide to Kulchur.

4. Or, as Gertrude Stein once rather frivolously said of Pound, quoting herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

5. Donald Davie, Ezra Pound, Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 147.

6. Pound's “Pentagon” of most-admired works consisted of the Odes of Confucius, the Homeric “Epos,” Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare's plays. By extension, the societies that sustained these works are also admirable.

7. George Dekker refers to H. G. Creel's Confucius: The Man and the Myth (London, 1951), pp. 276-301, as “a scholarly account of the connections between Confucian, French Enlightenment, and early American political thought.” Sailing After Knowledge, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 181n.

8. “All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil.” Pound in a letter to Henry Swabey, May 9, 1940. See Pound's Letters, ed. by D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 345.

9. Regarding this paradox, Stephen Spender has said that Pound “allowed his scrupulous poet's rhetoric of the study of ‘minute particulars’ to be overwhelmed by his secret yearning for a heroic public rhetoric. Sensibility has surrendered to will.” “Writers and Politics,” Partisan Review, 34 (Summer 1967): 377.

10. The rest of Canto 52 is a reworking into English of the Li Ki or “Record of Rites,” one of the Five Classics upon which Confucianism is partially built, and contains lines like “Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades / Sovran is Lord of the Fire / to this month are birds.”

11. A Visiting Card (London: Peter Russell, 1952), p. 22.

12. Appendix B contains a complete transcript of one broadcast, that of March 15, 1942. It is as “comprehensive” as any of the others, and it is more clearly argued than most. It returns, vituperatively, to one of Pound's favorite subjects, England. To read it is to get a fairly good sense of the broadcasts as a whole.

13. From Canto 74.

14. Mary de Rachewiltz, Discretions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 173.

15. See Morton Keller, “Jews and the Character of American Life since 1930,” in Charles H. Stember, ed., Jews in the Mind of America (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 265.