If there is one word which provides the clue to the life-work of Ezra Pound, it is "productivity." To him, man was essentially a productive animal, and if one thinks of Pound's aestheticism in this light, it ceases to be an escape from life, as in the case of previous Ivory Tower aestheticism. On the contrary, the life of the ordinary worker is subsumed under that of the artist. Even animals and insects are for Pound essentially artists….

Everything that helped production was good; everything that hindered production was bad. That was Pound's simple creed, and it informed all his work as an artist, as an economist and as an impresario of the arts. His aim was not merely production but productivity; i.e. a multifarious busy activity, continually branching out in an open-ended way. Not for him the finished product, with its air of completion and perfection. That would suggest that work can come to an end. His poems all capture the atmosphere of work in progress, of conceptions about to flower into performance; and as an entrepreneur of the arts he was continually helping to bring talent to parturition-point, to see that good work was not stillborn, to goad and harry those who stood in the way of production….

Unfortunately, Pound came to think of the Jews as the supreme anti-artists, the enemies of production. Pound's anti-Semitism was at first an unthinking prejudice to which he gave deliberate indulgence; later it became a vicious obsession, fed by Nazi propaganda and proliferating into theoretical constructions of paranoid complexity. But the role which he gave to the Jews was always the same; they were those who hindered and corroded true production by concentrating on activities which battened on the forces of production without contributing to them. The principal manifestation of the Jewish spirit was "usury"; but behind this (as he later came to think) lay the Jewish religion of monotheism, with its anti-artistic ban on graven images and its abstract unimageable God spinning in transcendental activity above the world like the money-market and its bodiless manipulations. (p. 59)

It has been argued that Pound uses the word "jew" merely as a convenient metaphor or metonymy; a word that will conjure up the required associations in his reader's mind without having to be taken literally. But such a metaphorical use must arise from the conviction that the Jews are the true source of the poison. A metaphor always implies certain known qualities in the object metaphorically adduced—qualities which throw light on the object described. So to call an activity "Jewish," even—or especially—when this is not meant literally, is to assert the existence of essentially Jewish qualities. It is mere confusion of mind to suppose that such "metaphorical" use of an anti-Semitic stereotype implies a lack of literalism in the anti-Semitism itself—it is as if calling one's love a red, red rose implied some doubt about the redness of roses. (p. 60)

Pound's sheer ignorance on the subject of Jews and Judaism is extraordinary. He seems to have made no effort to read about Jewish history, thought or language; yet he tries to create an impression of knowingness…. (p. 62)

Pound's carelessness and negligence in Jewish matters is, of course, part of his general strategy in the field of learning. In all the areas of study to which he contributed (Provençal poetry, Latin and Greek poetry, Chinese literature, economics, etc.), complaints have been made of his blunders, incompetence and charlatan bravado. Some of these complaints have been ill-founded, proceeding from the scholarly literal-mindedness which Pound detested and combated. Pound's translations, for example, are not intended to be literal, and the "howlers" (e.g. "votes" for "votas" in Propertius) arise from an original aesthetic of translation, not from ignorance. Yet his scorn of scholarly small-mindedness led him eventually into an insane self-confidence. He really came to think that he had only to know one or two facts about a civilization in order to intuit its whole essence. The "ideogrammic" method became a means to instant polymathy. The ideograms of Chinese picture-writing seemed of great significance to Pound (following his reading of Ernest Fenollosa) because they pointed to a way of thinking that would never lose touch with concrete particulars; a method that proceeded from image to image in such a way that generalizations emerged incarnate and never degenerated into disembodied abstractions. The connections of this theory of thought with Pound's affiliation to the poetic method of Imagism are obvious. His method of poetic composition, and even of prose composition, is the juxtaposition of significant details in such a way that the unconscious mind receives reverberations and forms generalizations subliminally, or alters its general conformations to see the world in a new light. The question is, "How does the poet know which details are significant?" The answer is that he does so in the light of a discursive theory previously arrived at but never explicitly disclosed. This is an answer Pound did not want to accept. He wanted to be just as surprised by his images as the reader; to choose the images or details by blind intuition and join the reader hand in hand to see where they would lead. But this is to abdicate the responsibility of the writer and to hand himself over to the mercy of his own unconscious prejudices. When Pound really knows about a subject, the ideogrammic method is successful. When he does not know about a subject, the ideogrammic method becomes not a way of thinking or expression but a substitute for them. It is all very well to choose the significant fact which will echo in the reader's mind and cause a re-orientation. But without a background of real, solid knowledge, how is one to be sure what counts as a significant fact, or even as a fact?…

We know incontrovertibly that the aesthetic stance adopted by Pound in the 1910s and 20s led him eventually into the moral abyss. How did Imagism, The Little Review and London soirées lead to the espousal of Nazism? The question is particularly interesting in that Pound's variety of aestheticism is one that appears to bridge the gap between art and morality, to turn towards the world instead of away from it and to concern itself with the health of the whole of society. (p. 63)

Pound's aggressiveness forms part of his aesthetic vision. The ruthlessness and dismissiveness which are essential to Pound's personality can be seen as the qualities of the sculptor, who produces his work through ruthless rejection of irrelevant material, which stands in the way of the revelation of the form hidden in the stone. (p. 64)

Pound was not against money as such, but he was concerned that it should always stand for some concrete thing, whether goods or services, that it should not take off into a world of abstraction and be "created out of nothing." The Jew, he thought, was the artist of money, performing bewildering arabesques with it which bore no relation to the processes of agriculture or production and which actually hindered those processes. Such creativity was "cancerous," having a life inimical to the social organism. It was also dirty and cloacal. Pound was aware of the thought expressed in Freud's dictum, "Money equals faeces," and in the scatological Cantos he shows the financiers as anally-fixated children playing with their own dirt, unable to attain to the genital phase in which the reality principle is acknowledged, the omnipotence-fantasy is renounced, and activity becomes a tackling of a presented world instead of a plastic molding of a "creatio ex nihilo." The presiding deity of Hell is "the great arsehole" (Canto 14), which is Pound's version of the Demiurge, or the Jewish God, creating the universe from nothing.

Pound's aesthetic and moral attitude of anti-pity should certainly not be rejected out of hand as inhumane. It is in some respects a noble attitude, and one which can be given support from the moral tradition of Judaism itself. Pity can often be a patronizing emotion, sapping the self-respect of its recipient…. (p. 65)

Like Nietszche, Pound saw something derogatory to mankind in the Christian concept of pity, and some of his finest poetry is devoted to denouncing this concept…. Nietszche, however, knew and admired the Old Testament, and excluded it from his condemnation. Nietszche loathed the anti-Semites of his day and would never have mistaken the racialistic sadism of the Nazis for the true pursuit of "purity."

How was it that Pound made this crude mistake? What taint was there in his doctrine of aestheticism that made him vulnerable to anti-Semitic propaganda of the vilest type, and led him to regard Mussolini and Hitler as the champions of culture in the Western world? From a doctrine emphasizing discrimination and from there is no inevitable progression towards inhumanity. From a doctrine of the sculptural nature of art, or from an ideal of a society patterned and regulated by laws of courtesy and good management, how does one come to the conclusion that the people who made morality into an art should be obliterated?

For undoubtedly, one of the most eerie aspects of Pound's anti-Semitism is that the qualities he most admired in society, and for which he explored Renaissance Italy and ancient China, are in many ways similar to those he might have found in the Jewish culture which he misunderstood and despised. The stately patterning of the seasons of the year by rites and ceremonies, the close attention to nuances of gracious behavior, the sober, rational regulation of commerce and lending—all these were closer to hand in the Mishnah than in remote Chinese texts. Pound's conviction that the Jews have always been an anti-agricultural people was sustained by a steadfast ignorance of the Bible, the Talmud and even of the Jews around him. (pp. 65-6)

The flaw in Pound's Weltanschauung was that it was after all basically aesthetic rather than moral. It was a kind of aestheticism which took over the field of morality in high-handed fashion. Much as we may applaud Pound's determination not to be an ivory-tower aesthete in the fin-de-siècle style, we may still find something anti-human in a morality which is subordinated to the claims of art. It was better, in a way, for the aesthete to feel that art and morality were opposed; even to dismiss the whole moral issue as beneath his attention…. At least this attitude allowed a certain autonomy to morality, and, while loftily dismissing nonartists from the realm of Beauty, permitted them to have a role in the inferior realm of the Good. Pound refused to acknowledge such limits; the artist must legislate as artist over all human concerns, including politics, morals and economics. The inhumanity inseparable from aestheticism, so far from being softened by the concern for human problems, was applied on a far wider scale. Pound did not regard human beings as ends-in-themselves but as elements in a pattern. His concern was not for justice, but for productivity, which means the production of pattern. Far more important than any human being was the goddess Form, whom Pound invokes with religious ecstasy…. (p. 66)

Pound's view of the artist is far removed from the Byronic or demonic; he sees the artist as the type of normality and health. And this makes his anti-Semitism all the more dangerous. Many aesthetes saw themselves as alienated figures, and the Jew as typical of the bourgeois world from which they were alienated; Pound, with his democratic, or rather populist vision, saw himself as the champion of the masses against the alien and alienated Jews. (p. 67)

All kinds of individual replies can be made to Pound's individual charges; but the central point is that Pound was right in sensing that the Jew was the chief enemy of his doctrine of the primacy of art. Even if Pound had read Werner Sombart, and discovered that the Jews, wherever they have gone, have brought material prosperity to their host nations (rather than the economic "cancer" which Pound attributed to their "usury"), he would still have hated the Jews (as did Sombart) for their love of abstractions, their ability to distinguish between the concrete and the universal, and their conviction of the primacy of justice. If all the masterpieces of art ever created were put in the balance against the life of one child murdered in Hitler's gas chambers, which should have been saved? There is no doubt about the Jewish answer to this question, but there might be some doubt about Pound's. (p. 68)

[The] very conflict between art and morality is basic to Pound's work and life, and … the answer he gave to it was largely responsible for his terrible guilt….

Moreover, Pound himself would not have wanted to be judged as a moral incompetent who happened to have a knack for poetry. He did not want to be forgiven, like an ex-Nazi football player. Art and morality were for him indissolubly linked. If his moral conclusions were wrong, then there was something wrong with his theory of art (and there is evidence that this is the conclusion which he himself reached at the end of his life). This is not to say that his work, however morally and artistically flawed, cannot be given its due appreciation. But to heap public honors on the man was either to endorse his style of humanity or to treat it with indulgent contempt….

Even if Pound's anti-Semitism can be attributed to irresponsibility, this irresponsibility was part of the fabric of his life, and of his legacy from aestheticism. It was essential to his poetic method and to his style of scholarship to cultivate carelessness, to avoid humdrum enquiry into the facts; and if, as a consequence, he made a tragic mistake, this cannot be written off as unimportant. Pound's anti-Semitism can be linked with all his basic attitudes as an artist and a thinker, and is an inevitable outcome of them. As for the artistic merit or otherwise of the anti-Semitic passages in the Cantos, this question is hardly applicable in the case of a poet who depends so little in his total design on local beauties or intensities. If we excise the anti-Semitic passages on grounds of aesthetic nullity, where shall we stop? Shall we excise the long quotations from economic manuals or from Latin documents or from the Chinese syllabary? The only relevant question is that of relevance itself—and who shall decide what, in the Cantos, is or is not relevant? (p. 69)

Pound's quarrel with the Jews was, in fact, far more than a stupid error or "suburban prejudice," despite Pound's own words. He picked out the Jews as his enemy because he sensed rightly (if obscurely) that they stood in the way of some of his most important objectives. They stood in the way of the "image" or the "ideogram"; because the Jews are the chief exponents of discursive rational thinking by means of words and alphabet (the alphabet being the paradigm of the divorce of sign from referent). The Jews make a clear distinction between words and things, between theory and practice, between universals and particulars, between form and content, between God and Man, between "the seventh day and the six days of Creation." And this, for Pound, was the cardinal sin. Theologically, the quarrel might be expressed by saying that Pound sees the divine as imminent, while the Jews see it as transcendent.

Pound was quite right in thinking that he stood for paganism against Judaism. This might have been a noble and significant conflict, if it could have been worked out without cruelty and lies. It is the conflict between those who wish to subdue themselves to the rhythms of the goddess Earth and those who wish to conquer the Earth by the hard weapon or tool of the intellect. Pound thought that he was the Sculptor, and the Jews were the children (clever, horrible Wunderkinder) who played with parasitic abstractions. But the Jews are Sculptors too. It is the object of both Pagan and Jew to cultivate the Earth. But the Pagan hates the Jew for making him think. This, he fears, is to leave the Earth for ever; to embark on a chill process of abstraction and lose contact with the Mother. (pp. 69-70)

To dismiss Pound's anti-Semitism as a mere aberration is [mistaken]…. [Anti-Semitism] is an integral element in [his] art and philosophy. Pound was the modern representative and exponent of a perennial point of view, Paganism; and he saw the Jews as his chief ideological enemy. (p. 70)