[In the following essay, Tuma attempts to trace the roots of Pound's later political course by analyzing Pound's 1912 essay Patria Mia, a cultural critique of Pound's belief that a forthcoming American renaissance was approaching.]

There has been rather a lot written lately on Ezra Pound's politics, a good part of it concerned with Pound's fascism.¹ Somehow Pound's work still can summon a rhetoric of urgency and embattled desperation. His canonical status provides ample ammunition for those political critics who wish to fire away at the skeletons of the New Criticism. But beyond the role Pound has played in the now ancient revolt against New Criticism, which has been repeatedly castigated for its conservatism, there has been remarkably little discussion of Pound within the context of American politics. Larger questions of ideology, intention, poetry and politics, and so on—these have been discussed, sometimes brilliantly, with regard to Pound but often at the expense of a detailed discussion of American political history. Italian Fascism must surely factor into any analysis of Pound's political propaganda of the thirties; even so, someone should take the time to compare that propaganda to the propaganda of such organizations as the America First Committee, because American support for fascism did not begin or end with Pound, nor was it so exotic as his radio broadcasts suggest.

That comparison is not exactly the task I have set up for myself here, though I do mean to analyze Pound's politics and cultural values within a national context. I want to examine Pound's politics well before he turned to Italian fascism—in 1911 and 1912—because there one sees how unidiosyncratic his political views could be. A reading of Pound's work within the history of American political and cultural institutions will not exonerate Pound, but neither will it scapegoat him by making him seem a larger than life specter of evil, a casebook of the essential psychological constitution of hysterical anti-Semitism. Even the most severe critics of Pound are willing to grant that his most disgusting obsessions developed gradually.² Here my interest is Pound at the beginning of his career, a period too often ignored or superficially discussed in the analysis of Pound's fascism. I am convinced that some of Pound's most important cultural criticism was written before World War I, when he could still remember recent experience of American life. In this early criticism Pound articulates values that remained with him throughout his life, though clearly the means he recommended for implementing these values and even the relative emphasis among them were eventually to change.

The crucial essay in Pound's early cultural criticism is Patria Mia. Some of his claims in this essay are echoed in the rather cryptic essay “The Renaissance.” We have two texts for Patria Mia, the original written for an English audience and published in installments in A. R. Orage's The New Age, and a revised version intended for an American audience.³ As we shall see, Pound's awareness of differences in these two national audiences informs Patria Mia in several ways, as does the example of Marinetti's Italian Futurism, which Pound had witnessed in London. While Pound's efforts to define an essential national character may seem simplistic from our contemporary perspective (though they are no more simplistic than the efforts to define national character in Jean Baudrillard's recent book America), his essay does force us to contemplate the powerful nationalistic tendencies within the historical avant-garde. No American poet was more influential within that avant-garde than Pound, and no American poet was in a better position to speak to differences in national contexts.

Patria Mia is nowhere near as full of bluster and posturing as Marinetti's more influential manifestos from the same period, but it too is a kind of manifesto. Along with critical analysis of the condition of culture in England and America, the essay contains raw prophetic utterances typical of the cultural manifesto as a period genre, and the statement of a program designed to bring about what is predicted. For Pound as for Marinetti, the poet is a visionary, uniquely sensitive to imminent change in life, art, and culture. The poet asserts a future which he is the first to recognize, and then uses that imagined future to pummel his contemporaries, who are represented as hopelessly mired in the past, their active or passive resistance retarding a future which is inevitable anyway. The manifesto as employed by Pound and Marinetti is really quite remarkable for this contradiction: angry, “engaged” with contemporary conditions insofar as it is critical of them and ready to offer proposals, its argument finally implies that all of the rhetoric doesn't matter anyway. With the future assured, the day is already won. Or, at least this contradiction is typical of the avant guerre manifesto in general: in some ways Pound's manifesto presents a special case. It is the most pragmatic of the manifestos of the historical avant-garde.

What Pound predicts in Patria Mia is nothing less than a renaissance of vast proportions, in which America would lead the way. He has very little material evidence on which to base this prediction. Two New York buildings are adduced as signs of a new metropolitan American civilization. Two precursors, James and Whistler, are named, but only to prove that it was not impossible to be American and a great artist. Beyond the lack of concrete evidence, Pound does not seem altogether certain of just what his renaissance will entail. At some points it seems to mean revolutionary change in all areas of society, a complete “liberation,” and at other points it seems to mean only progress within the “existing machinery” (PM 131)—to use Pound's phrase.

Here are two passages from Patria Mia that reveal some of the difficulty in thinking about Pound's politics in this text:

A Risorgimento means an intellectual awakening. This will have its effect not only in the arts, but in life, in politics, and in economics. If I seem to lay undue stress upon the status of the arts, it is only because the arts respond to an intellectual movement more swiftly and apparently than do institutions, and not because there is any better reason for discussing the first.

A Risorgimento implies a whole volley of liberations; liberations from ideas, from stupidities, from conditions and from tyrannies of wealth or army.

(PM 111)

A “volley” of liberations—the slightly awkward avant-gardist metaphor seems to reveal revolutionary intentions, a refusal to submit any longer to “stupidities” and “tyrannies.” Some fourteen pages after this definition we get this:

I have put belief in Utopias afar from me … It is improbable that any Utopia would satisfy more than the most energetic minority of the race. Yet if a final perfection and harmony be denied us, it seems still possible that we might make a number of improvements in the running of things at large. It is all very well to say that Erasmus pointed out the folly of war before Mr. Shaw did, and that a stupid race goes on using muskets. But it is equally undeniable that some of the follies diagnosed by Erasmus have been, since his time, amended.

(PM 125)

The first passage points to an intellectual awakening that will precipitate sweeping, even revolutionary change. No agent for this change is specified. Since at several places in the essay Pound calls for an elite which might issue propaganda for his renaissance, it may be that he imagines that artists might participate in a political vanguard, but Pound professes to be disinterested and for the most part limits his discussion to the status of the arts. And nowhere is he specific about political action or organization, or even his basic allegiances. The second passage, with its more guarded optimism, imagines a role for criticism in society, but fails to identify the means by which that criticism might be made effective, or even the interests—beyond broadly humane interests—it might serve. Does Pound place his trust in larger historical forces that he is merely speaking for? Is he aligning himself here with an existing political party? The answer to both of these questions is yes. He doesn't need to be specific about the instruments of political change because his own language implicitly acknowledges a commitment to the social and political policies of the progressive wing of the Republican party, as I will show.

Part of the difficulty in the passages quoted is that Pound is addressing his original English audience, especially the intellectuals around The New Age's editor A. R. Orage. The New Age was the site of much detailed and energetic debate about the means by which guild socialism might be institutionalized in England. Elsewhere in The New Age articles which make up the original text, Pound mentions guild socialism rather tentatively as “a possible solution.”⁴ In a 1935 memorial essay on Orage, Pound insists that he did not become interested in Orage's political ideas until after the war, by which time the earlier English Guild Socialism, which saw itself as a democratic alternative to authoritarian tendencies in Collectivism and State Socialism, had been partially abandoned and replaced with Douglasite ideas about currency reform.⁵ As a reader of The New Age in 1911 Pound was probably as informed about the political ideas of Guild Socialism as most intellectuals in England, but with a humility that years later would be completely uncharacteristic, he offers his observations as those of a naive outsider and relatively disinterested party: “The readers of contemporary works on social theory are doubtless far ahead of such naivete as I have shown here.”⁶ And yet, as if to prove that some new political system such as the one then being formulated by Orage and others (and beginning to find a significant constituency) must be considered, Pound relates an anecdote about a staunch Tory. He had met a Tory, Pound says, and talked with him of guild socialism. Of course this Tory had not been convinced of the benefits of the guilds. But the Tory felt sure of a coming revolution in which “the upper classes are to be in one way or another despoiled.”⁷ The point of the anecdote seems to be that revolution is inevitable, perhaps even imminent.

But Pound is writing to the English about his own country, and he cannot have felt that political revolution was imminent in America. Guild Socialism was at the time a specifically English movement.⁸ In America the few people, mostly not intellectuals, who subscribed to similar ideas were part of the Socialist Party of America, the largest American socialist organization of the period, a party just then at its peak of over 100,000 members, divided into factions that had only a little to do with doctrine and ideology.⁹ Though the socialists were a presence in American politics, Pound does not look to them for his renaissance. In preparing the manuscript for an American publisher, he removed all specific references to guild socialism and syndicalism. If we want to reconcile the two passages quoted above within the American political context, we must look to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party, which established itself in the campaign for the 1912 presidential election as an alternative to the traditional Republicans around the soon-to-be ousted William Howard Taft and the Democrats around the soon-to-be elected Woodrow Wilson. These Progressives were a self-designated “modern” party. Party meetings were dominated by an intense feeling that “New forces” had been “released by the magic of a new political ideal”—as one party intellectual put it.¹⁰

Pound does put his trust in a kind of magic. Amid a stream of complaints about provincial America, he declares that “we have tomorrow against them” (PM 133)—them being everyone from editors and professors to those who believed that poetry was the business of women's societies. He puts his trust, as he says, in the “national chemical” (PM 123). The roundabout pursuit of a definition of the “national chemical” leads him into a long discussion of differences in the temper and morals of the English, French, and Americans. Ultimately he suggests that his contemporary America is comparable to Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance. As Italy had benefitted from a mingling of cultures, America would benefit from a mixing of cultures among immigrants, some thirteen million of whom arrived in America in the first fourteen years of the century, most settling in cities. A diverse, rapidly changing population along with the fact that the United States had only recently become a nation (he dates the “birth” of America in 1870, after Reconstruction) meant that standards of taste were still in flux. A “new donation” was possible (PM 103).

While at least one critic has suggested that Patria Mia reflects Pound's anxiety about immigrants—most of whom were not of Anglo-Saxon descent and many of whom were Jewish or Roman Catholic—there is little evidence for this claim in the text.¹¹ This is a little surprising, for we do have evidence of such anxiety in Theodore Roosevelt and others among the political elite of all parties.¹² John Higham, an historian of American anti-Semitism, suggests that “the problem of anti-Semitism in America (between 1870 and 1920) ultimately needs to be viewed in relation to mass immigration.”¹³ The great fear, perhaps most notoriously expressed in Dr. Alfred P. Schultz's Race or Mongrel (1908), was that Jews “were everywhere independent of environment.” Roosevelt urged Jews to throw off “the suffocating miasma of ghetto debilitation” and Charles Taft, brother of William Howard Taft, accused Jews of ingratitude for their reluctance to join the armed services; these are just two examples of the response among “nativist” intellectuals and politicians to the “problem” of Jewish immigration.¹⁴ Pound's essay, especially as it appeared in England, is not free of anti-Semitism; several racist remarks mysteriously disappeared in the revised version. But Pound seems more intrigued by the significance of his comparison between Florence and New York than worried about the corruption of Anglo-Saxon blood. Even in the essay's original form, the Jewish question is decidedly peripheral as Pound tries to envision the renaissance society he hopes for. He has confidence that an intelligent criticism, harder to promote than great art because more dependent on an educated community than on individual effort, might yet direct the form of a still inchoate American civilization. He offers the odd but not unprecedented theory that America's “mongrel” population would be affected by climate: unknown to most was the fact that New York and Florence were on the same geographical parallel (PM 101-107). He uses the word “mongrel” to describe a quality of American society he thinks bodes well for his renaissance.

In contrasting national cultures, Pound typically seeks to explain intellectual and moral values by locating their source in the conditions of life. His analysis is not exclusively dependent on a crude economic determinism, though there are elements of this in what is after all a rather poorly conceived cultural anthropology. Pound believes that most Americans would find the habits and morals of the French less strange than those of the English. Whereas the English, after years of living in close quarters in cosmopolitan centers such as London, protect their privacy with an elaborate and thoroughly codified social decorum, the open spaces of America resulted in Americans having a greater desire for meeting new people and ways of life. Like the French, Americans are enthusiastic and tolerant. (As the National Enquirer says, “inquiring minds want to know.”) Pound does not seem aware of one potential problem with his logic here, for, if he is right about the correlation between a predominately rural, “decentralized” life and tolerance and openness, then the urbanization of American which he otherwise celebrates would be as likely to produce the stifling civility of London as the new renaissance civilization he desires. But one must consider that Pound is a determinist only in his analysis of English culture. The English character and morality are fixed, the product of a civilization where inherited resources, “property,” are culturally and socially determining.

Whereas Pound's England is beyond change, Pound's America is still in flux. To put this most baldly, the English had traditions that seemed likely to resist critique, while the Americans had no powerful and coherent traditions and could thus be told what to do. Pound's idea that he could tell people what to do was not appreciated by most of his friends—witness the case of William Carlos Williams, child of immigrants—but Patria Mia's program for creating an intellectual culture practically ex nihilo depends on Pound's sense that America would be receptive to artists and intellectuals. So Pound writes that, while the “sense of property” goes a long way toward explaining values in England, the future of America is bound up with its ability to value “human resources” over and above “property.” Pound quotes from campaign propaganda in 1911 the phrase “The first duty of a nation is to conserve its ‘human resources,’” identifying “human resources” as a watchword in the presidential campaign (PM 120). The quotation of this phrase identifies Pound as a supporter of the Progressive wing of the Republican Party, eventually the Progressive Party after Theodore Roosevelt was persuaded to run against William Howard Taft.

In his handbook of the Progressive movement, complete with an introduction by Roosevelt, S. J. Duncan-Clark wrote that

The conservation of human resources is a distinctive policy of the Progressive movement. This, more than any feature of its programme, has drawn to it thousands of earnest men and women, who, hitherto, have taken small interest in politics.

By it we are projected on to a higher plane of political warfare, where the air is more exhilarating and the vision clearer. There comes to us a new courage and a new zeal. The struggle, that has seemed so sordid, assumes a splendor and dignity that appeal to the best in our common humanity. We are fighting now, not for the rights of dollars, but for the rights of man; not for protection of property, but for the safeguarding of women and children.

The field comprised by this inclusive phrase—the conservation of human resources—is so vast that only a library of books could deal with it adequately. And libraries have been written concerning it; great libraries, long neglected by our statesmen and politicians, but now becoming mighty factors in the shaping of issues and the remodeling of government.¹⁵

Here was a party calling the intellectuals out of the libraries! Beyond the bombastic rhetoric of visionary politics—a rhetoric not far removed from Pound's—there rests a populist program. The Progressive Party wanted to encourage “social consciousness” in American industrialists, in part by expanding the regulation of industrial and business practices begun by the Roosevelt administration in the first eight years of the century. To reactionaries such as Taft, Roosevelt pointed out that social consciousness was the only effective antidote to the class consciousness promoted by the IWW and the left-wing of the Socialist Party of America. Roosevelt wrote that the future of American politics depended on which of “two gospels” would prevail—class consciousness or social consciousness. He remained convinced that it was the industrialist millionaires, the “owning class,” which would determine which gospel would triumph.¹⁶ His role was to persuade them to act responsibly. And this is exactly the role Pound wanted in Patria Mia. He had no argument with Roosevelt and the Progressives.

Roosevelt's Progressive Party must be distinguished from the progressive Democrats around Wilson, or rather from what was understood of these Democrats in the campaign Pound witnessed. Duncan-Clark thought that the Democrats were advocating “implacable warfare” against all business combination, thereby threatening the “distur-bance of business to no good end.”¹⁷ Up to this point anti-trust laws had been used with some restraint, had been used even by Taft, and not always with the best results. Now Wilson was proposing to use no restraint in the application of these laws, with the hope that the restoration of full competition was possible. This, he hoped, would bring back something like the nineteenth century world of small companies, regional markets, and local economic and political control. The Progressives warned that this proposal was not only naive but impossible to enact. Advanced modes of production led inevitably to greater centralization. They proposed instead to create a federal administrative commission to regulate industries engaged in interstate commerce. Intelligent businessmen were likely to be willing to submit to federal regulation as a rational and just solution to contemporary economic problems that were creating increased class antagonism.¹⁸

While it is not clear to what extent Pound would subscribe to every particular Progressive program, his attitude towards American business is, like theirs, opportunistic. On the one hand, he thinks the “iniquities” of the American millionaires were obvious to all. On the other hand, he thinks that “it is permitted us to believe that the millionaire is no more a permanent evil than was the feudal overlord” (PM 126). The point then was to propound a scheme whereby the millionaire might be persuaded to do something useful for the arts and for civilization, to provide intelligent and much-needed patronage. Pound does not believe that “any donation from the wealthy will blind the people to the status of things as they are” (PM 126). And there was no reason the businessman could not be persuaded to act responsibly towards the arts, and in fact it would benefit him to do so.

This is where the architecture Pound admired in New York enters the argument. Architecture has a utility even the businessman might recognize:

We have, to begin with, architecture, the first of the arts to arrive, the most material, the least dependent on the inner need of the poor—for the arts are noble only as they meet the inner need of the poor—

And architecture comes first, being the finest branch of advertisement, advertisement of some god who has been successful, or of some emperor or of some business man, a material need, plus display.

(Ren 219)

Only two buildings—the Penn Station and the Metropolitan Tower—have transcended functional utility and achieved something of the splendor or “display” that might signal a new civilization, but this was enough to suggest to him that the new patrons of civilization might prove as capable as their Renaissance predecessors. Architecture is important to Pound, as to many avant-gardists, because it is intimately connected with the daily life of the masses. Buildings are simply there—evident for all to see, worked and lived in. With more confidence in the capacities of the American public at large than he was ever again to show, Pound writes that the mere presence of a significant architecture invited comparisons. The American people, given models of excellence, would not long tolerate inferior work. All that was required was a will to set things in motion and a propaganda to help direct this will.

In 1911 and 1912 Pound thought that the Americans had the will, at least some of them did; the Progressives must have been evidence of this. It was not enthusiasm to improve the conditions of culture and life that the Americans lacked. What was needed was an independent critical apparatus, a center of opinion distinct from the only two centers Pound recognizes, Paris and London. He writes that “America has as yet no capital” of its own (Ren 214). A developed capital or center is important because there no artist can pass off imitative or mediocre work without some censure. His much celebrated internationalism does not contradict this insistence on the value of a cosmopolitan American center:

No one wants the native American poet to be au courant with the literary affairs of Paris and London in order that he may make imitations of Paris and London models, but precisely in order that he shall not waste his lifetime making unconscious, or semi-conscious, imitations of French and English models thirty or forty or an hundred years old.

(Ren 214)

If America was to have a renaissance, its natural energy must be directed by those with some knowledge of the history of world cultures. As the Progressives had presented what they took to be a pragmatic scheme to use the success of American business to their own advantage, Pound proposes a scheme to set in motion the revolution in taste that would channel the energy promising a renaissance.

Pound's specific recommendations are enumerated as three economies which, if implemented, would improve the condition of the arts in America and encourage his renaissance. First, like Matthew Arnold, Pound believes that criticism must hold up American art and literature to the standards of the best work in the history of world art and literature, forsaking the provincial standards of America's past. Secondly, Pound wants “a definite subsidy of individual artists, writers, etc., such as will enable them to follow their highest ambitions without needing to conciliate the ignorant en route” (Ren 225). As wealthy Americans had already demonstrated a willingness to endow scholars and universities, and even a fledgling Academy of the Arts in Rome, Pound does not believe that this is an impossible demand. The support could be most useful to young artists who are, without the benefit of reputation, least able to survive in an open market for art. Third, Pound wants to establish one, or, preferably, several “super-colleges,” where scholars, critics, writers, and artists could interact to the benefit of all. By “driving the actual artist upon the university seminar” (PM 133), the specialized research encouraged by the German university model might be made relevant to contemporary artistic practice. Increased dialogue among scholars, artists, and popularizing critics would precipitate more synthetic work and a more informed public.

There is an element of elitism in Pound's proposal, but he was convinced that his super-colleges would eventually benefit the entire nation, going so far in his effort to convince the businessman as to document the cash value of the arts—their importance to the tourist industry. Furthermore, Pound believed that the arts are “noble only as they meet the needs of the poor”—Progressive rhetoric and sentiment indeed. But he also believed that the only way Americans might effectively seize the day was to establish a system of innovative academic and critical institutions which could mediate between artists and the populace. These, apparently, were not meant to replace existing institutions immediately, but to supplement them, with the hope that eventually their influence would permeate the culture at large. When we think of some literary magazines and experimental colleges such as Black Mountain College, we might have an idea of what Pound wanted to create, though the marginal status of these institutions does not reflect Pound's desire that such institutions become increasingly central to an evolving culture. Still, it is the patience of Pound, sometimes obscured by his avant-gardist rhetoric, as well as the pragmatic nature of his proposal, which best distinguishes him from Marinetti and other avant-gardists, who dreamed of directly manipulating the masses—“shocking” them—with theatrics borrowed from P. T. Barnum and others.

At the height of his engagement with Fascism in Italy, Pound wrote and published a canto in Italian in which Marinetti, dead for some years, appears as a speaking ghost. The specter of the famous Futurist visits Pound requesting the use of Pound's body to fight for the Fascists. Pound applauds his desire to join the fight but must refuse his request, as his body is too old. Preparing to leave, Marinetti's ghost speaks some parting words, summing up his own career and Pound's.

In molto seguii vuota vanitade,
Spettacolo amai più che saggezza
Né conobbi i savi antiche e mai non lessi
Parola di Confucio né di Mencio.
Io cantai la guerra, tu hai voluta la pace,
Orbi ambidue!
                    all'interno io mancai, tu all'odierno.(19)
In many things I have followed empty vanity.
I've preferred the spectacle to wisdom
Nor did I know the ancient sages and I never read
A word of Confucius or of Mencius.
I sang the war; you wanted peace,
Both of us blind!
I lacked inner depth, you a concern for what was going on outside.(20)

This is Pound's comparison, and it comes many years after the writing of Marinetti's most famous Futurist manifestos and Pound's Patria Mia, but it speaks to important differences between the two men, differences that are evident from the beginning. Even before he knew what war, destruction, and revolution could really mean, Marinetti had glorified them. He had been a genius at organizing events violent and mock-violent, carnivalesque demonstrations and evenings, all of which were extremely popular in sensation-craving Europe, at a time when, as Wyndham Lewis put it, an artist could be a star. In 1910 he dropped 800,000 leaflets denouncing “past-loving Venice” from the top of the Clock Tower at San Marco, his target a crowd returning from the Lido.²¹ He advocated the destruction of museums and tradition, collapsing the distinctions between elite and mass culture, between art and life. He was, in short, the avant-gardist extraordinaire, from whom many of the avant-garde movements that followed took their cue.²² Pound, a bemused witness to this spectacle, could only say of it in 1912 that after Marinetti was through “tearing down” Venice, the Americans might rebuild it on the mudflats of New Jersey and use it for a “tea-shop” (PM 107). The Americans fortunately had no Venice of their own, and were thus incapable of effusive sentimentality about their traditions and their past. Rather, Americans had to be taught something of the history of civilizations in order to learn “what sort of things endure, and what sort of things are transient; what sort of things recur; what propagandas benefit a man or his race …” (PM 125). This is nothing less than an agenda for his epic poem.

The recent work on the history and theory of the avant-garde is unable to account for such a combination of revolutionary enthusiasm and Arnoldian liberal probity. For Peter Bürger, Charles Russell, and others, the historical avant-garde can be distinguished from a larger modernism by its aggressive refusal of the autonomy accorded art in bourgeois society.²³ In Bürger's narrative, the avant-garde is a reaction against the “art for art's sake” aestheticism of the nineties. Art's separation from social praxis and ritual, a condition achieved with its release from religious and courtly affiliations and patronage into the markets of the modern world, resulted in an art of no consequences. Or at least this much became clear as the nineteenth century progressed, culminating in aestheticism, which made the autonomy characteristic of art in bourgeois society the primary subject matter of art in a willful refusal of the means-end rationality of the bourgeoisie. The more extreme response of the avant-garde in the first decades of the century was to refuse the category of art, renouncing bourgeois values as well as esoteric rituals of asetheticism's artists' cenacles, abolishing the distinctions between art and life, high and mass culture. In this way, the theorists suggest, the historical avant-garde thought that art could once again assume a use-value, though its former function within religious ritual would now be replaced with a revolutionary political function.²⁴ The avant-garde can be distinguished from modernism by its direct engagement with its ideologically determined status within society. Where modernists such as Thomas Mann and T. S. Eliot are best thought of as alienated, the avant-garde in its destructive and nihilistic spirit represented a fundamentally revolutionary social movement. Modernism in this taxonomy remains largely disengaged, capable of proposing new social orders modelled after some more organic past, but still in its use of traditional art forms and categories apart from the events and “movements” of the avant-garde.²⁵ In other words, the modernists remain bogged down in a form of artistic production that accepts the de facto political ineffectuality of their own labors.

Without a tradition of high culture in America, according to Andreas Huyssen, the antics of the historical avant-garde in the first two and a half decades of the century were, politically speaking, meaningless.²⁶ America was looked to by many European avant-gardists as the beacon of a new civilization exactly because of its energetic popular culture and its relative freedom from an effete and snobbish tradition of high culture. We have heard this claim about America often, mostly from Europeans, and we read something similar in certain passages in Patria Mia, as when Pound praises the vigor of advertising prose. It is true that America has never had institutions of high culture with the political sanction and centralizing influence on taste that, say, the French Academy once had.²⁷ But one overstates the case if one says that America was without traditions of “high culture.”²⁸

Pound wrote Patria Mia as an expatriate in London, where just two years later his most characteristically avant-garde publications would be written. One might argue that it was only in London that Pound found enough resistance to promote an avant-garde; he found in America only neglect. Yet the bulk of the criticism in Patria Mia was aimed directly at the institutions of high culture in America. Pound's primary targets included the American university system, William Dean Howells and other editors of “highbrow” literary magazines (some of which had rejected his poems), and the bourgeois ladies' societies which constituted a powerful system for the transmission and preservation of culture. One might argue that Pound would have been content to improve the condition of high culture in America, but, if my reading of Patria Mia is accurate, Pound was promoting a renaissance that would eventually have effects throughout society, in all its institutions, political and otherwise. And Pound was at least as “engaged” with party politics at this time as most avant-garde figures ever were, more than most of these figures in fact, the avant-garde being notorious for its tentative and temporary political affiliations.

Pound's early prose may seem relatively apolitical next to the manifestos of Marinetti, the later manifestos of successive European avant-garde movements, or his own fulminations of the thirties, but this is due to his belief that the Progressives had political matters pretty much under control. He felt free to concentrate on the arts. They shared his enthusiasm for change; their rhetoric is full of a zeal about constructing a modern world that must have been extremely attractive to a poet intent on making poetry a modern art in which America would excel. It would not be exaggerating the case to describe Pound's program for the arts in Patria Mia as “entrepreneurial.” Perhaps only in America at this moment would avant-garde rhetoric and mainstream politics coincide. Despite Pound's own late disclaimers about his interest in Marinetti's spectacle, the years following the composition of Patria Mia would find Pound engaged in several efforts to promote avant-garde movements (though it must be added that Pound was much less successful at this than Marinetti). Pound was self-aware enough in Patria Mia and in Blast to recognize that his own manifestos were advertisement, bluster, “propaganda”—a word he uses several times in Patria Mia. And he was consistent enough to admire the entrepreneurial spirit of American businessmen. Whatever else we can say about Pound's politics following the election of Wilson and the entry of the United States in World War I, we must recognize him at the beginning of his career as Ezra Pound, Progressive.

Notes

1. See Michael A. Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, N.J., 1980); Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, Il., 1988); John Lauber, “Pound's Cantos: A Fascist Epic,” Journal of American Studies 12 (1978): 3-21; Jerome J. McGann, “The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction,” Critical Inquiry 15:1 (Autumn 1988): 1-25; Andrew Parker, “Ezra Pound and the ‘Economy’ of Anti-Semitism,” in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 28 (Minneapolis, 1986), 70-90; Jean-Michael Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos” (Albany, N.Y., 1986).

2. See, for example, Casillo, 4-8.

3. Pound first published Patria Mia in The New Age in 11 installments between 5 September and 14 November 1912. After revising the articles, he sent the complete manuscript to a Chicago publisher in 1913. The book was scheduled for publication in 1915, but problems with the publishing house left it unpublished until 1950. For the publishing history of Patria Mia, see Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London, 1969): 108. For references to Patria Mia within the text, I use the 1950 text, as rpt. in Selected Prose, ed. William Cookson (New York, 1973). I use the essay “The Renaissance” (1913) as rpt. in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (1935; rpt. New York, 1968). Patria Mia is abbreviated within the text as PM; “The Renaissance” as Ren. References to passages removed from the revised edition of Patria Mia are footnoted.

4. Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia,” The New Age (October 10, 1912), 564.

5. For Pound's obituary of Orage, see “In the Wounds,” in Cookson, ed., Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909-1965, 440-451. For an account of Orage's political development and Guild Socialism, see Wallace Martin, The New Age Under Orage (New York, N.Y., 1967), 193-293.

6. Pound, “Patria Mia,” The New Age (October 10, 1912), 564.

7. Ibid., 564-565.

8. For a brief discussion of English Guild Socialism, see Daniel Bell, “Two Roads from Marx,” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1962), 387-392.

9. See James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984). 1-118.

10. S. J. Duncan-Clark, The Progressive Movement: Its Principles and Its Programme (1913; rpt. Boston, 1972), 287.

11. See Casillo, 55-56.

12. See George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America (New York, 1958), 90-95.

13. See John Higham, “American Anti-Semitism Historically Reconsidered,” in Jews in the Mind of America, ed. George Salomon (New York, 1966), 250-51.

14. See Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT., 1979), 143-64.

15. Duncan-Clark, 109-110.

16. Theodore Roosevelt, “Introduction” to Duncan-Clark, xvi-xvii.

17. Duncan-Clark, 208.

18. See John A. Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, N.Y., 1978), 87.

19. Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXII,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York, 1987), 805.

20. Unpublished translation by Kaspar Locher of Reed College.

21. See Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York, 1972), 55-56.

22. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986).

23. See Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984) and Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York and London, 1985).

24. Bürger, 47-54.

25. Russell, 7-14.

26. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986), 167.

27. It is possible to argue, as Huyssen has, that this situation changed after World War II. But what Gerald Graff writes about the history of American literary studies can be applied to the history of American institutions of high culture in general: “Both the accusatory and the honorific view of literary studies—which turn out, curiously, to be the same view—rest on wishful thinking. They credit the institution with a more cohesive impact than it has ever achieved … Literary studies have been no beacon of political enlightenment, but they have not been an instrument of dominant ideology and social control either—or, if so, they have been a singularly inefficient one.” See Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, Il., 1987), 13-14.

28. The most detailed work to date on the history of the “highbrow” / “lowbrow” distinction as it took shape in America is Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, 1988).