[In the following essay, Wilhelm analyzes some of Pound's later poetic outputs from the 1950s and the efforts to free him from St. Elizabeths Hospital.]

This would be a good year to release poets

—Ernest Hemingway in 1954 shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature

By 1955, everyone interested in serious literature was curious about the nature of the ensuing cantos, because the rumor was already out that Ezra Pound was working on them, despite the efforts of Dr. Overholser to play the subject down. When Section: Rock-Drill was published by Vanni Scheiwiller in Milan in September (the New Directions publication followed in 1956 and the Faber in 1957), readers were somewhat surprised by the reversion to a pre-Pisan form. The first-person sufferer at Pisa had disappeared, and instead, one was faced at the start of Canto 85 by the formidable Chinese character LING in the second tone, which was defined by the last word of the next line: “Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility.” Despite this magnificent proclamation, the effect of the whole canto was a bit overwhelming.

In Ezra Pound: Poet As Sculptor, Donald Davie describes the impact as follows: “The Pisan sequence is so refreshing [that it is] … all the more discouraging that the next several cantos to appear (85 to 89) thrust us back into Chinese and American history in a way that seems to be sadly familiar. … The mere look of Canto 85 … announces it as ‘unreadable’” (204).

Unfortunately that remains the opinion of a majority of readers. The canto ends with a note that informs one that “Canto 85 is a somewhat detailed confirmation of Kung's view that the basic principles of government are found in the Shu, the History Classic. The numerical references are to Couvreur's Chou King.” Obviously Pound expected everyone to rush out and acquire a copy of the French scholar Séraphin Couvreur's edition of the Confucian Chou (Shu) King, which offers both a French and a Latin translation of the text.

If one takes the trouble, as Thomas Grieve did (“Annotations”), one will probably find a confirmation of the fact that the basic principles of Confucian government can be derived from a study of Chinese history, but it still does not answer a basic question: is this collection of excerpted Chinese characters with occasional Latin glosses and abrupt English quotations poetry? The majority of Pound's readers, including many of his most avid ones, say no.

One needs only to take a look ahead at the very different way that Pound presents Chinese material in Cantos 98 and 99 of Thrones to see a far better method. There Pound tends to play down the characters and to present ideas in units or blocks that make sense, even when they are interwoven in intricate patterns. The brilliance of Cantos 98 and 99 makes the failure of Cantos 85 and 86 all the more poignant. But, as the Italians say, “One learns by making errors,” and Pound seems to have learned at least this over the next few years.

Cantos 87 to 89, however, are quite comprehensible and not at all as difficult or boring as some have tried to make them. Here Pound returns to one of his favorite topics, American history, focusing on the book that had brightened many of his days in the early fifties: Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years' View; or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 (published in New York in 1854), in which the Missouri congressman recounts the battle waged by himself and President Andrew Jackson against Nicholas Biddle (still another Biddle in Pound's mental or actual life) and the evil Second National Bank of the United States, the heir to Alexander Hamilton's First National monster. Canto 88 is especially dramatic and well-ordered, as I sought to demonstrate in my essay on politics and banking published in my Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (64ff.).

Canto 87, which precedes the battle, is much less well organized, consisting of rambling meditations about usury, nature, American politics, Dante, Richard of St. Victor (whom Pound was studying with S. V. Jankowski of Australia), Mencius, and others. As an entity, it is probably too loosely allusive, even though individual lines or perceptions are haunting, especially the quotations (sometimes echoed from the past) from Scotus Erigena (“All things are lights”), from his old London friend Laurence Binyon (“BinBin is beauty. / Slowness is beauty”), and from Mencius (“‘Nowt better than share (Mencius) / nor worse than a fixed charge”). The canto remains, however, somewhat disjointed, despite the coherence of its general thought to the rest of the poem (see the “hitching-post” character on page 576, where Pound laments the fact that many good ideas do not survive because they are not linked to something substantial). The hauntingly beautiful final line, “Tigers mourn Sikandar,” links the large cats that recur in the poem to the Indian pronunciation of the name of the conquerer Alexander (the Great).

Canto 88 presents a more or less straightforward description of how Benton and Jackson defeated Biddle and the Bank. The canto ends strangely, with the aces of the four suits of playing cards printed, but with the spade turned upside down. According to a note by Eva Hesse in Paideuma (2, 143), Pound “saw the playing cards printed on the skirt of one of his visitors to St. Elizabeths. He interpreted it as an evil omen that the printer placed the Ace of Spades upside down, as it appears in all editions.” And so, despite the brief victory presented here, evil will return, Pound is saying, precisely as he laments “BELLUM PERENNE CANO” (I sing eternal war) again and again in these Later Cantos.

Canto 89 opens with the lines that explain the entire presentation of Rock-Drill: “To know the histories / to know good from evil / And know whom to trust,” with Chinese characters denoting “History Classic.” This canto, in a much less cohering way, continues the story of Benton's work, with many side allusions to the history of France and other cultures. Although it lacks the impact of 88, it is not lacking in memorable lines, such as: “The wrong way about it: despair / (I think that is in Benton)” (598)—which probably refers to the sad story of Colonel J. C. Frémont, the great explorer of the American West, who was courtmartialed by President Polk for inciting a revolt against the Mexican administrators of the territory of California, although he was later pardoned. Pound places him next to his Ezuversity disciple Michael Reck, who visited the grave of Ernest Fenollosa in a temple overlooking Lake Biwa in Japan in June of 1954:

I want Frémont looking at mountains
                    or, if you like, Reck, at Lake Biwa,

The most quoted canto of Rock-Drill (which was the name of a famous sculpture by Pound's friend Jacob Epstein of London) is, without a doubt, number 90. It has often been said that Pound wrote this canto with Sheri Martinelli and her work in mind, and that she is also the Undine of Canto 91/610. But one hardly needs to read either canto with La Martinelli in mind, any more than one has to see Hilda Doolittle every time the word “dryad” appears in the text, or to think of Olga Rudge every time a beautiful woman occurs in the earlier cantos. If Pound wanted us to see Sheri Martinelli here, he would certainly have mentioned her, just as he mentions his poet-friend Juan Ramón Jiménez (author of Animal de Fondo) here and Marcella Spann (who was soon to appear on the scene) in Canto 113/786. Let us not turn the nominalistic, pragmatic Pound into a surrealist. If Martinelli was creating works of art that seem to contain some of the symbols (snakes) and mythic figures (Isis, Kuanon) mentioned here (see Companion 2:543), one does not have to study these works in order to understand Pound's poetry, which is infinitely more important.

Canto 90 opens with a Latin quotation from Richard of St. Victor, which calls love a delight of the soul and emphasizes its natural functioning (against the Church ascetics, who seemed to want to do away with love entirely). The canto ends with another Latin quotation from Richard: “UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST” (“Where there is love, there is the eye”). One should remember that in 1946, as soon as Pound was able to order some stationery for himself, he had printed as a crescent at the top these French words: J'AYME DONC JE SUIS (I love; therefore I am); these were an obvious parody or, one should say, correction of the famous statement of the philosopher Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum” (I think; therefore I am). In fact, this replacement of dry cognition by sentient philanthropy is perhaps the central radical of the ideogram known as the Cantos. Great Neoplatonic Christian thinkers like Richard and Hugh of St. Victor are preferred to those who condemned love in almost any form, and who, unlike St. Hilary of Poitiers, never “looked at an oak leaf” (Canto 92/622).

Canto 90 is an incantation, a summoning of forms, a creation of a temple out of the forces of nature (as opposed to ex nihilo). It links Greco-Roman motifs with Christian and Chinese, and is hence universal. The opening lines, taken from the seventeenth-century astrologer-mystic John Heydon, sound as if they could also have been spoken by Confucius: “From the colour the nature / & by the nature the sign!” Many of the “actors” in the canto are people who were destroyed or condemned by the Catholic Church for being eccentric: Jacques de Molay of the ill-fated Templars and Scotus Erigena (excommunicated and cursed centuries after his death), or Tyro and Alcmene, who were confined in the ancient Underworld. Like Pound in 1955, they desire ascension, deliverance, freedom, and in Pound's prayer, they get it:

out of Erebus, the delivered,
                                        Tyro, Alcmene, free now, ascending
e i cavalieri,
                                        ascending
no shades more

(608)

Pound's prayer would soon be fulfilled for himself.

The central part of the canto contains an elaborate litany of levitation based on the phrase “m'elevasti” (you have raised me) from Dante's Paradiso 1.75, which the Italian poet uses to address his Beatrice, who will take him through the celestial spheres to a vision of the essence of the cosmos in the form of the Christian Trinity. But even in this imitation of celestial striving, Pound cannot keep the shadows from appearing: Elektra, “the dark shade of courage”; dying trees; and, most important perhaps, oblique mentions of Evita (Peron of Argentina), the beer-halls (of Munich), and a mind “furious from perception,” which is later taken as a reference to Hitler (Canto 104/741). But as Scotus Erigena had said in his De divisione naturae (On the Division of Nature), in the life after death, which is devoid of fixed topoi like Hell and Heaven, the cosmic energy will flow toward its next coalescence, and the evil shadows will be there, if only to define the light. Pound also insisted that one could find dark elements in Dante's Paradiso, and one certainly can in the speeches of the redeemed as they narrate life back on earth.

Canto 91 is equally beautiful, though it is more a moving meditation than a fixed piece, and hence somewhat harder to follow. It opens with some troubadour neums based on Bernart de Ventadorn's famous Lark Poem; in the fourth line of the first stanza, Bernart says that when he views the lark winging its way upward toward the sun (like Dante voyaging outward), the bird then dips downward, overcome “by the sweetness that enters his heart” (“per la doussor que al cor li vai”). Pound modifies the line slightly at the start, and changes the “his” to “my heart,” thereby putting himself in the place of the bird (see my note in Paideuma, 2, 333-35, for a fuller discussion).

From the start, this canto is also one that concerns celestial movement and freedom. It is filled with mythic images, especially feminine ones such as Reina (an unnamed Regina or Queen), the seductive mermaid Undine, Diana, the Sibyl, and, at the end, Queen Cytherea (Aphrodite-Venus), who has recurred in the poem since Canto 1. Possibly the most stunning apparition is “The Princess Ra-Set,” which combines and feminizes two prime male Egyptian divinities: the good solar Ra and the evil lunar Set; the composite is then sometimes referred to as the lunar Isis propelling the moon barge. Pound's son-in-law, Boris de Rachewiltz, an accomplished Egyptologist, says in Eva Hesse's New Approaches to Ezra Pound that we thus have the whole solar-lunar cycle (181) presented here. Also striking is the sudden appearance of Queen Elizabeth I, “Miss Tudor,” who inspired Sir Francis Drake to heroic exploits, along with Empress Theodora, who influenced her husband, the great lawgiver Justinian of Byzantium (they appear together in mosaics in Ravenna that were very dear to Pound).

Suddenly however, what seems like a celestial dream erupts in a stream of vituperation against some U. S. presidents of the twentieth century, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Maritain, and Robert M. Hutchins, whose radical reduction of the intellectual canon at the University of Chicago appalled Pound. Despite the word “kikery,” the Jewish Julien Benda (author of The Treason of the Clerks, Intellectuals) is upheld over the others.

Almost as swiftly as this dark cloud arises, it disappears as the poet again fixes on the good and the beautiful, this time in the form of memories of Verona. As in the Pisan sequence, a statue or painting of Can Grande della Scala reminds the poet of his boyhood friend Tommy Cochran. Pound also thinks about the sisters Adah Lee and Ida Mapel, who visited him often in the hospital. But then we return to the mythic, followed by a preacher with divine properties, Apollonius of Tyana, who promoted a doctrine that united the human with the natural and the divine. The canto ends with a reference to the planet and goddess Venus, “who moves the third heaven,” the heaven of love (the lines are taken from Dante's Paradiso 8.37).

Canto 92 can be called a return to earth after the two attempted flights before it. It contains some allusions to Pound's friends, such as to Desmond Fitzgerald, the Irish patriot who took part in the Easter Uprising of 1916; the blind Italian administrator Carlo Delcroix, who said, “I carry my blindness” for countless Italians; and Giuseppe Bottai, the earlier Minister of Education, who helped Pound acquire a Vivaldi manuscript, and who was now back in Pound's life through son-in-law Boris; and of course the old futurist-politician Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was heroic in wartime. All of these, to Pound, are figures of glory. But the descent from visions of goddesses to proud but somewhat flawed heroes cannot really lift Pound out of his fallen condition; correcting others' notions of an “artificial Paradise,” Pound confesses:

Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel
                                                                                                                        but is jagged,
For a flash,
                                                  for an hour.
Then agony,
                                                  then an hour,
                                                                                                                        then agony,
Hilary stumbles, but the Divine Mind is abundant
                                                                                unceasing
                                                                                improvisatore

(620)

There is also a sad attempt to draw the reader into the poet's own desperate situation: “Even you were happy last Wednesday”—some of the most pathetic lines in the poem.

The canto ends with thoughts about the desensitization of feelings toward nature, upholding people like Apollonius of Tyana, Scotus Erigena, Avicenna, and Richard of St. Victor, as opposed to the warmakers and the destroyers of the world we live in.

Canto 93 could be called the Dante Canto, even though Dante references resound through the entire work (as I point out in my Dante and Pound). The canto begins with references to two Egyptian rulers, whom Pound discovered through son-in-law Boris. First we have the hieroglyphs of King Khati (Khaty), which are translated below them, followed by a mention of Antef. If one consults Boris's excellent essay in Hesse (178), one learns that “Antef is recorded as having voiced the injunction ‘Give bread to the hungry, beer to the thirsty.’” In short Antef wanted to distribute “angel bread,” the “panis angelicus” that Dante speaks of in his Convivio (Banquet), to everyone (the bread is a metaphor for knowledge).

Then we return to Apollonius making peace with animals, and a memory of the wartime encounter with Archbishop Pisani that Mary de Rachewiltz described in Discretions (113-14). After some Provençal lines taken from Bernart de Ventadorn's Tant ai mo cor ple de joya (lines 45-48), which say that the poet suffers more greatly in love than Tristan did for Isolde, and some reminiscences from Cantos 90 and 91, we then have a fairly long poetic commentary on Dante's Convivio, which I analyzed in detail in my Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (46ff.). The nexus of this section is that Pound is saying that theology or philosophy cannot succeed if they do not have some form of love as an essential part of their operation. Dante's statement in Convivio 4.4, that man is, as Aristotle said, a social animal (“compagnevole animale”) is linked with Egyptian hieroglyphs to that effect.

After the names of several contemporaries (all of whom can be found in the Companion), Pound again launches into a prayer for the light, mentioning St. Ursula, Isolde, Piccarda Donati (from Dante's Paradiso 3), as well as the lunar Isis, already cited. There are more references to contemporaries like the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio, mixed with the same kinds of lyric moments that have appeared earlier—all with Dantesque refrains and ideas woven among them. Possibly the most important is the injunction toward beginning a new life, “nuova vita,” and the words that the consummate human-divine character Beatrice utters to her fallen beloved: “e ti fiammeggio” (“and I flame for you”; Paradiso 5.1), implying both passion and illumination—which Pound, unlike most Church doctors, does not want separated. The line “Oh you … / in the dinghy astern there,” taken from Paradiso 2.1, is a teasing call for the reader to persevere through difficult passages in an attempt to follow the leader.

The canto ends with a dream of rising out of Hell at sunrise, as Dante did, but with an admission that Pound's Beatrice (whoever she is) is as “tender as a marshmallow,” who cannot be used “as a fulcrum.” The poetry drifts off with petals falling through the air (like Canto 13), the wind half-lighted with pollen, but diaphanous, and with a call to Monna Vanna (Lady Giovanna, Guido Cavalcanti's lover); the last words, “you make me remember,” are taken from Purgatorio 27.49-51, which Dante, at last having gained the Earthly Paradise, addresses to the lovely nymph Matilda. I read this last sequence as conveying pathos and loss far more than triumph and achievement, although it is clear that the poet will not for a minute give up his dream of achieving consummate happiness.

Canto 94 opens with a tortured introduction that finally leads to an extended presentation of the life and career of Apollonius of Tyana, who has already been presented: “Apollonius made peace with the animals” (635). This canto is based on The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written by the Greek Philostratus (born ca. a.d. 172), and is translated in the Loeb Library edition by F. C. Conybeare, who was a fellow and prelector at University College, Oxford. Quoting my own analysis of this section from The Later Cantos, I would like to repeat that “The neglect of Apollonius is a great pity because he offers an excellent link between ancient philosophers, such as Pythagoras and Plato, and the best Christian and Arabic minds of the Middle Ages” (89).

There is no room here to recapitulate my analysis of Canto 94, which covers a journey made by an unacknowledged Messiah as he moved from the Mediterranean to the East, spreading the kind of neopagan, Neoplatonic doctrine that Pound in 1955 was eager to accept, precisely because it ran counter to the dry, unpoetic, vapidly anti-artistic doctrines of most religions, especially those which forbade “graven images”—sculpture and other visual works of art. It is true that the Greek lines from Apollonius's text probably turn off more readers than one could imagine, and they add nothing to sound values for most people, but that was Pound's risk, and he took it willingly. At this point in his life, Pound seemed to feel that readers had to come to him, not the other way around.

At the end of the canto, Pound tries to relate Apollonius to the great lawgiver Sir Edward Coke and the medieval philosopher-theologian Ocellus, along with the words on the Emperor T'ang's bathtub already voiced earlier: “Every day make it new.” Thus Confucian renovation and Dantesque renewal come together.

The end of this sequence, Canto 95, opens with some magnificent lines: “LOVE, gone as lightning, / enduring 5000 years”—which refers to the careers of Kati and Antef. Weaving through a variety of references that have already been mentioned earlier in the poem, Pound inserts one Elder Lightfoot [Michaux], who, as Michael Reck has informed us, “was a riproaring Negro preacher who exhorted his faithful in great meetings at Griffith Stadium—a very much alive man with a real poetic rhythm in his voice. Pound heard him on the radio at Saint Elizabeth's, and described him as he was: one who had an insight into the process of nature” (104).

The Leucothoe nymph, who is supposed to have rescued Odysseus on his voyage, may well have been a tribute to Sheri Martinelli at this time, but because the Cantos do not celebrate the ephemeral over the lasting, and Miss Martinelli was soon to disappear, one does not have to see her here. Olga Rudge, after all, was still waiting in the wings, and desperately desiring a chance to bring her long-lost lover home. There is a great deal of animosity vented toward the end of this canto, with a crashing of waves as Odysseus tries to return to the land he loves (clearly not America), but “Leucothea had pity.” The section of Homer's Odyssey referred to here is Book 5.333ff., where Odysseus is exhorted by the rescuing sea goddess as follows (in the florid translation of A. T. Murray in the Loeb): “Strip off these garments, and leave thy raft to be driven by the winds, but do thou swim with thy hands and so strive to reach the land of the Phaeacians, where it is thy fate to escape” (343-45).

Unfortunately, Rock-Drill was a disappointment to many. Those who wanted it to have the personal touch of the Pisan sequence were disappointed, and those who wanted it to have the narrative clarity of the Chinese-Adams sections were also disappointed. From this point on in the poem, one had to settle for a mixture of both styles. But the important thing to realize is that Pound was once again at work on his masterpiece.

Thanks to the assiduous efforts of Mary, Olga, and now Boris, progress was made toward this end in Italy. More and more Italian intellectuals were joining the Pound family in asking for the poet's release, many of them directed through newspapers by John Drummond, Pound's British friend from the thirties who was now living in Rome. Working out of Castle Brunnenburg, the “Amici di Ezra Pound” constantly tried to drum up help from the influential. In 1955, the young publisher Vanni Scheiwiller drew up a petition that was signed by such important people as the writers Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale, and Alberto Moravia. This was submitted to the U. S. Ambassador to Italy, Clare Booth Luce, whose husband, Henry, was the moving spirit behind the influential Life Magazine.

In 1956, another petition was handed to Mrs. Luce by Diego Valeri, containing the signatures of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Enrico Pea (Pound's translation of his Moscardino was issued by Scheiwiller in 1956), Mario Praz, Ignazio Silone, and others. The signers, who had been in the main anti-fascist, begged the U. S. government “for a benevolent re-examination of Pound's case and the withdrawal of the charges against this illustrious poet … we express the hope that Pound, his liberty restored to him, may return to his Italy so loved by him, here to conclude his days in work-filled peace.”

Mrs. Luce was impressed by this support, and tried at least twice to discuss the matter with government administrators, but to no avail. However, her husband's popular magazine did run an editorial on February 6, 1956, which was much quoted: “Pound's room at St. Elizabeths has been called ‘a closet which contains a national skeleton.’ There may be good arguments for keeping him there, but there are none for pretending he doesn't exist. The crimes of World War II have aged to the point of requital, parole, or forgiveness. For this reason, if no other, the arguments for quashing the indictment against Ezra Pound should be publicly considered.” The importance of support like this from a prestigious, conservative publication, although not immediately visible, was inestimable. Other supporting editorials followed in The New Republic (April 1, 1957) and The Nation (April 19, 1958).

Another important event of 1956 was the much-delayed visit of Archibald MacLeish in December. It is easy to understand why the poet and now sometime professor at Harvard had waited for so long. From the mid-twenties on, Pound had subjected MacLeish to a great deal of unnecessary invective. MacLeish had shrugged off the early aesthetic criticism, although he finally erupted in a letter written probably in January 1934 (Letters 263f.):

I don't like to be cursed and I have no intention whatever of holding onto the shitty end of one of your famous correspondences. I know what you think of me and frankly I don't give a good goddam. You have praised too many really rotten writers for your condemnations to go very deep. What I am interested in is your poetry and fixing things up so that you can go on writing it. And I want neither thanks nor the opposite for that. I merely want to be told as civilly as possible what I can do in your behalf and then I want a little patience while I try to do it.

MacLeish's anger was fully justified, and his perseverance in the relationship is admirable.

There was not much commerce between the two men during the late thirties and the war. When Pound was first indicted in 1943, MacLeish was director of what became the powerful Office of War Information, and he was appalled by Pound's conduct abroad. He wrote to Ernest Hemingway from Washington on July 27:

I am sending you, under separate cover, a set of negative photostats of transcripts of Ezra Pound's broadcasts. Monday they indict him for treason, Tuesday I send you the evidence. …

I haven't been able to read them all, but it is pretty clear that poor old Ezra is quite, quite balmy. What motivates him primarily is apparently the fact that he just plain doesn't like Jews. Also, there is that Major Douglas bug he swallowed. Plus his conviction that he has read American history—which the facts don't seem to support.

Anyway, it is a very sad business. What will save him, if anything does, is the fact that no jury on earth could think this kind of drivel would influence anybody to do anything, anywhere, at any time. …

Poor old Ezra! Treason is a little too serious and a little too dignified a crime for a man who has made such an incredible ass of himself, and accomplished so little in the process.

All in all, this was a very astute analysis of Pound's true insanity at the time and the almost ludicrous hollowness of any serious charge of treason.

But Ezra did not profit directly or psychologically from MacLeish's compassion. MacLeish wrote on September 10, 1943, urging Harvey H. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of War under Henry L. Stimson, to treat Pound as cautiously and humanely as possible, and he tried, with the urging of Cummings, Eliot, Hemingway and others, to exert whatever impact he could on government officials, but without any tangible rewards. When President Eisenhower, a staunch Republican, replaced Truman, MacLeish, who had served under the “New Deal” Roosevelt, was now rather ineffectual. Furthermore the letters he received from Pound were often filled with tasteless invective against FDR and his wife Eleanor, who, Pound said in a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti on October 12, 1954: “has carried vulgarity to the point of obscenity and has the mind of a lavatory attendant.”

Despite the rudeness on Pound's part, MacLeish never lost his respect for Pound's poetry—especially the early cantos and the Chinese translations, as he states in his Reflections (63-66). He defended Pound against the Saturday Review of Literature attacks of 1949 in his Poetry and Opinion (1950), and stuck by him until, finally in December of 1955, as he informed Hemingway in a letter of June 19, 1957, he worked up the courage to visit him (something that Hemingway never quite managed to do). That was only the second time that MacLeish had ever seen Pound (the first being at Theodore Spencer's place at Harvard in 1939), and the effect of the visit was so appalling—once again, in spite of what Dr. Torrey and others have said—that he vowed then and there to “spring” Pound as soon as he could, difficult as he knew it would be.

But if things were moving well in 1956, there was also an undercurrent of danger—provided by the irresponsible actions of the already mentioned John Kasper, former owner of the Make It New Bookshop in Greenwich Village, partner with David Horton in the Kasper and Horton Square Dollar Series, and now a resident of the Washington area, where he proclaimed himself the “Segregation Chief” of the Seaboard White Citizens Council, with headquarters in the capital. By 1957, Kasper's actions in blocking the integration of high schools in Tennessee and elsewhere had led to his incarceration.

Unfortunately, several newspapers linked Kasper to Pound, precisely at this time when such a linkage was lethal. But when Kasper was put behind bars, he quieted down, and he slowly disappeared from Pound's history (to the applause of Pound's family and friends, especially Hemingway), eventually becoming an automobile salesman. When Harry M. Meacham, who entered the scene in 1957, tried to press Ezra into making a public condemnation of the rabble-rouser, the worst that the poet would say was “Well, at least he's a man of action and don't sit around looking at his navel” or “I don't think you can show any connection between my telling Kasper to read Confucius and Agassiz and his present imprisonment” (The Caged Panther, 62). Somehow one wanted more than this.

Meacham says in his memoir (32) that he was suddenly impelled to visit Pound after reading Archibald MacLeish's review of Section: Rock-Drill in the New York Times of November 16, 1956, which concluded with these words:

Not everyone has seen Pound in the long, dim corridor inhabited by the ghosts of men who cannot be still, or who can be still too long. … When a conscious mind capable of the most complete human awareness is incarcerated among minds which are not conscious and cannot be aware, the enforced association produces a horror which is not relieved either by the intelligence of doctors or by the tact of administrators or even by the patience and kindliness of the man who suffers it. You carry the horror away with you like the smell of the ward in your clothes, and whenever afterward you think of Pound or read his lines a stale sorrow afflicts you.

Meacham was a very responsible person, not only a financial expert with Dun and Bradstreet but also the president of the Poetry Society of Virginia. When he visited Pound in 1957, he was appalled by the “ragtag bunch of camp followers making a great deal of noise and actually obstructing serious action by distinguished scholars” such as Giovannini and LaDrière. Meacham neglects to mention that there were also many other responsible people visiting or writing to Pound at this time, including the eminent classicist J. P. Sullivan, and writers like Guy Davenport, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. But the impact of people like Kasper and Mullins stood out too noticeably. Nevertheless, Meacham stuck by Pound in the future, exerting influence not only in Virginia and the capital, but also in France with the publishing house L'Herne, which would issue Pound's translations and tributes widely from Paris.

Dag Hammarskjöld also read that very important review by MacLeish, and he wrote to the reviewer saying, “You may know that—with the discretion imposed upon me by my office—I have been doing what I can in order to straighten out Pound's situation” (Meacham, 116). Indeed the Secretary-General of the United Nations contacted several important members of the Eisenhower administration, but could not effect anything that mattered at that time. He also tried to persuade the Nobel Awards committee to consider Pound for the prize for literature, but this was never to happen.

MacLeish was doing the same kinds of things, prevailing on Senator J. William Fulbright in July of 1956 and then on Christian Herter, the Undersecretary of State. Meanwhile, he was constantly energizing Pound's two most influential friends, Eliot and Hemingway, and had brought a reluctant newcomer into the fold, the venerable octogenarian Robert Frost, whose name wielded great power among the masses. MacLeish told Ezra by mail on November 16, 1956, that he was writing an extremely important letter to the Attorney General, which would be signed by “four or five of your most distinguished contemporaries.” Actually, the letter that was sent to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., on January 14, 1957, on stationery with a letterhead from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was signed only by Frost in Vermont, Eliot in London, and Hemingway in Cuba in that order. It was a simple letter, pointing out that the poet had already been imprisoned eleven years for a crime for which he had never been tried.

Frost's participation in the whole affair has been viewed in two widely different ways: either, as Frost himself later led people to believe, as the prime instigator of the liberation, or, as even Frost's biographer Lawrance Thompson has declared, as a very slow and somewhat recalcitrant assistant. After all, the old Yankee had very little to thank Ezra Pound for, except his support of Frost's first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, back in the London days of both poets, when the older Frost needed the help of the younger Pound, who was more established there. But Ezra had proved to be almost unintentionally crude in his dealings with the often temperamental older man, and Frost had deeply resented this. Now, however, after the healing passage of time, and seeing what a colossal injustice was being committed, the New England poet decided to do what he could, even though, as Meacham quotes Pound himself, “He ain't been in much of a hurry” (132). Later, however, when he was asked if Frost had ever repaid Pound for his early support, Ezra said, “Frost's debt was paid when he published North of Boston” (132).

Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., responded to Frost on February 28, 1957, saying that he had requested a review of the matter, and that he would be back in touch when this was completed. His Deputy Attorney General, William P. Rogers, replied on April 10, 1957, that he was willing to talk with the signers of the letter about Pound's plight. But when Rogers' letter arrived, Frost was already on his way to England to receive honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. MacLeish pursued him, and even stayed in the same Hotel Connaught in London, where they were joined by Eliot. On returning to his home in Vermont, on June 24 Frost told MacLeish to “go ahead and make an appointment with the Department of Justice.”

The meeting took place in Washington between Rogers, MacLeish, and Frost on July 19, and there were supporting letters from Hemingway and Eliot. Three days later, MacLeish wrote Ezra from his home in Conway, Massachusetts, that “Robert Frost and I went to see the boys at the Department of Justice last Friday” on a boiling summer day. He summed up: “For the immediate future and so long as the Kasper mess is boiling and stewing the Department will not move. I have never understood … how you got mixed up with that character” (Letters 401-2).

In the second half of 1957, some promising things were happening. Richard Rovere wrote a very compassionate article for the September issue of Esquire, and numerous other writers, among them Marianne Moore, wrote in to affirm his views. The American Civil Liberties Union sent letters in support of Pound to the Departments of Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare. Seemingly of their own volition, Senator Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon and Congressman Usher L. Burdick of North Dakota began to take an interest in the case. As a result, H. A. Sieber, a research assistant in the Senior Specialists Division of the Library of Congress, was instructed to prepare a report on Pound, and in the spring of 1958, Sieber produced The Medical, Legal, Literary and Political Status of Ezra Weston (Loomis) Pound (1885-): Selected Facts and Comments. This report carefully weighed the meaning of treason and concluded “Whatever prejudices Mr. Pound may have are, of course, irrelevant to a consideration of his legal case” (24).

On October 23, 1957, Robert Frost had a second confrontation with William P. Rogers, and everything seemed to be sailing along very smoothly. But suddenly without any warning an article appeared in The Nation on November 16, titled “Weekend with Ezra Pound.” It was written by a graduate of Dartmouth named David Rattray, who was not a member of the Ezuversity and who was as appalled by the people around Pound as many others were. Etched in acid, the article created an almost half-mad world peopled by a highly eccentric Sheri Martinelli doing sketches of the rigid, half-hidden Dorothy, with other odd-balls (some inmates, some visitors) in the wings. Pound was quoted discoursing in helter-skelter fashion about a variety of topics but primarily on usury and Byzantium, his current interest. Although Rattray did not present the halcyon picture dreamed up by Eustace Mullins and others, he harmed in the opposite direction, by portraying a Pound acting as a guru for a group of debased disciples, some of whom he was feeding from hospital food (this last point caused more embarrassment for Dr. Overholser, who was still recovering from the Kasper scandal).

Actually during this last year at St. Elizabeths an important new disciple emerged: a charming, good-looking serious young Texan named Marcella Spann, later Booth. She first appeared at the hospital in April of 1957, a little frightened about winning a job as instructor of English at Marjorie Webster Junior College in Washington. Pound tried to buoy up her confidence, and out of this effort came their mutual editing of the anthology Confucius to Cummings, which did not appear until 1964. Marcella and he referred to it as the “Spannthology.” In two articles written for Paideuma, Marcella describes this academic world that Pound created on the lawn during the good weather, noting that the most frequent “students” were John Chatel, David Gordon, David Horton, and La Martinelli, who was now being driven to the side. Her article “Ezrology” is dedicated to Hollis Frampton, an avant-garde filmmaker from Cleveland who had joined the group back in 1956, and who died tragically young at forty-eight in 1984. Pound valued Hollis's wit and his dedication to art.

Marcella did not create the picture of an Earthly Paradise at St. Elizabeths that others would like us to accept. She makes it very clear that, after a few hours of delightful conversation, she or others would walk Pound back off the lawn to the grim, bleak portals of Chestnut Ward, where a dour guard named Newton would then clang the door shut.

But by 1958 other doors were opening. On January 2, at the suggestion of MacLeish, Undersecretary of State Herter wrote to Dr. Overholser: “Would it be asking too much if you could drop in some day at your convenience as I would very much like to be fully informed in respect to this difficult individual?” Dr. Overholser made the visit shortly thereafter. Also on January 2, Attorney General Rogers (who had replaced Brownell) wrote to MacLeish saying that he wanted to talk to him and that he was “certainly inclined” to think that things were working themselves out. On February 1, Dorothy Pound wrote to Overholser, assuring him that if her husband were released, they would head immediately for Europe (this was an important matter to the State Department, which did not want Pound's disciples milling around him in the future); she also assured the doctor that her husband had no political views about contemporary Italy.

Thanks largely to the work of MacLeish, Robert Frost was now deeply involved in the attempt to free Pound. On January 16 he received a telegram from President Eisenhower that congratulated him for having won the Gold Medal Award of the Poetry Society of America. On February 12, Frost wrote to his old friend Sherman Adams, who was the Chief of Staff of the White House and whom Meacham described as “the most powerful figure in Washington, next to President Eisenhower” (Meacham 124); Frost suggested that they might stage a meeting at which he could thank the president. At the same time, Eisenhower was being pressured by an economic adviser, Gabriel Hauge, who was also J. Laughlin's brother-in-law. An informal dinner was set for February 27; this was preceded by a special luncheon at which the now indefatigable Frost was able to talk privately to Attorney General Rogers and Sherman Adams.

By now rumors of Pound's impending release were rife. The Sieber report was released on April 1, and on April 2, the New York Times announced, almost to test the waters that “The Justice Department is giving consideration to dropping the treason charges against Ezra Pound, the poet, with a view to letting him return to Italy.” Attorney General Rogers had asked, “Is there any point in keeping him [at St. Elizabeths] if he never can be tried?” Instead of causing a hullabaloo, the news was greeted for the most part either with approval or silence; vengeance had at last yielded to apathy. After all, the Russians and other communists had long since replaced the fascists as the world's primary villains.

Finally on April 14, the aged but tireless Frost once again went down to Washington from Vermont to speak with Sherman Adams, who put him back in touch with Rogers. Adams had gone to President Eisenhower with a note from the Department of Justice, which was then initialed, signifying approval. A week later Frost was back in Washington and went for a last visit to Rogers; according to Meacham, Frost said to the Attorney General, “I've dropped in to see what your mood is in regard to Ezra Pound,” and Rogers replied, “Our mood is your mood, Mr. Frost” (Meacham 124). And so, the job was done, although there were still plenty of details to work out.

For one thing, Pound was still under the control of Dorothy, who was not discharged as the “Committee for Ezra Pound” until February of 1959, and as a result, he was not in any position to hire a lawyer (not to mention to handle his financial affairs). The lawyer selection was done through Frost's consultation with William Shafroth, the Deputy Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, who suggested Thurman Arnold, a member of the firm of Arnold, Fortas, and Porter; Julien Cornell, the previous lawyer, was quietly put to the side, but he had been a student of Arnold at the Yale Law School. Arnold, by a fluke of fate, had been a student at Wabash College during Pound's memorable few months of instruction and so was no stranger to the man or the case. In his Fair Fights and Foul (236-42), Arnold describes how difficult the situation was; for example, no one had asked Dorothy's approval of him as a lawyer, but she quickly gave consent. The firm generously decided not to accept a fee.

On April 14, Arnold sent Dr. Overholser a copy of an affidavit in the doctor's name outlining Pound's situation and saying that, if he were called to testify, he would say that he persisted in believing that Pound suffered from a paranoid state, but that “further professional therapeutic attention under hospital conditions would be of no avail and produce no beneficial results” and that “the indictment pending against Ezra Pound can [never] be tried” (SEH, Folder 1081b). Arnold sent the signed copy of this along with a formal “Motion to Dismiss Indictment” to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

On April 18, the case of the United States v. Ezra Pound was heard before Judge Bolitha Laws, who had presided over the indictment proceedings back in 1945. The proceedings were almost like an anticlimax. The next day the New York Times reported the dismissal of the treason charges in an almost matter-of-fact manner. It noted that Mr. Pound himself, who was freed from confinement for the first time since 1945, “sat in the back of the courtroom, dressed in a shabby blue jacket, a tan sport shirt with the tails not tucked in and blue slacks.” Also present were Dorothy and Omar, a teacher at Roxbury Latin School in Boston, as well as “a group of persons evidently among his literary admirers.”

The hearing was quick and uncontested. The government attorney, Oliver Gasch, said that he was convinced that the defendant could never stand trial and agreed with Arnold's motion. As a result, Judge Laws signed the order of dismissal and, twelve and one-half years after he had become embroiled in this “mess,” Ezra Pound was once again a free man.