The Writer as National Figure

...for better or worse

On May 3rd, 1945, Ezra Pound turned himself over to US troops in Italy. For weeks they interrogated him and then transferred him to the camp outside of Pisa, and thus we have a name for the famous “Pisan Cantos.” Pound’s transfer is said to have occurred on May 24th, and two days later we get mugshot below.

Once there, Pound was held in an outdoor cage for three weeks before being given a tent. Of course, what follows is literary history—Pound’s transfer back to the United States, his arraignment for treason, and subsequent commitment to Washington D.C.’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the next 13 years. He wrote quite a lot during his stay in St. Elizabeth’s—winning the inaugural Bollingen Prize in 1949—James Laughlin, who ran New Directions, published The Pisan Cantos in 1948, with Pound still of course housed in St. Elizabeth’s. At the time, this caused quite a controversy.

I am aware of Pound’s history. I have listened to a number of his radio broadcasts (thanks to PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania), and there is no denying his engaging in antisemitism and racism—according to Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Daniel Swift’s The Bughouse, he anonymously wrote a number of racist pamphlets for a white supremacist who populates one of the most varied and star-studded visitor lists in history.

When reading Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, I was struck most by the difference in how writers were socially perceived then versus now—frankly, writers (even poets!) were important, influential, and when they spoke people listened. The U.S. government wanted to make an example of Pound and, among all those captured in Italy upon its surrender, sought him out specifically. To entertain the counterfactual, had Pound been convicted of treason, which he was arraigned for, he would have been executed, either by hanging or possibly by firing squad. Again, all of this based largely on the content of his radio broadcasts, made while he was living in Italy and enthralled with fascism and Benito Mussolini.

He avoided execution by being declared mentally incompetent, and not without a little help from his friends—the literary heavyweights of the time rallied to save him from execution. Pound became the celebrity resident of St. Elizabeth’s (though the initial portion of his stay was in the maximum-security wing): his wife visited every day, he had free rein of the grounds, entertained various mistresses, and received regular visits from people like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and more. During Pound’s commitment, it was writers like Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot who advocated for his release, with Frost being the one to secure pro-bono work from a Washington law firm to aid their effort. They finally succeeded in 1958. The Washington Post quoted Ernest Hemingway as saying, “Whatever he did has been punished greatly and I believe he should be freed to go and write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood.” Pound immediately returned to Italy.

Now, this is not a post about “separating the art from the artist” or even how I feel about Pound’s work (though I do admire Cathay very much). What this is about, and that I still have trouble wrapping my head around, is that we would have executed Ezra Pound for programming that, by today’s standards, simply qualifies as “campaigning.” Today, the media personality that was World War II Ezra Pound wouldn’t be able to crack local talk radio, let alone a major network I will not name. He would simply be too light of fare.

Of the Americans who have been arrested and convicted of insurrection (technically not the same as treason) for their participation in the events of January 6th, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, 113 have received home detention. A number of people have received much harsher sentences, but only 2 sentences total exceed the time that Pound spent in St. Elizabeth’s (note: I am still happy for all of these convictions). A Capitol police officer, injured during the riot, died the next day; because this couldn’t be tied directly to murder, with the death officially labeled as “natural causes” from a stroke, the sentence handed down was 6 years.

Now, time in prison versus Pound’s time in St. Elizabeth’s are not the same kind of “time.” Still, I cannot shake the notion that Ezra Pound, whose broadcasts likely carried little influence (let alone were intelligible enough to do so), would have been executed in what would have surely been national, front-page news. Today’s news ecosystem, social media, “rallies,” average campaign statements, and even bumper stickers are Pound broadcasts on steroids—see Tommy Tuberville in the past week or so.

I confess to, at this moment, wondering what I am trying to say. Is this another diatribe of “things are worse than ever”? Or maybe, given my love for the institutions that are writing, publishing, and reading, I am reacting to the fact that someone like Ezra Pound—as detestable as many of his words and actions were—simply mattered so much. Not a political party, not a “thinktank,” not a “society,” not an organization, not a media outlet, not an open-handed Supreme Court Judge, not an institution—a single poet.

I have heard said on occasion that Mark Twain was America’s first national celebrity. But maybe that came and went with Halley’s Comet, which appeared in our skies in both the year of Twain’s birth and of his death. The next appearance was in 1986, which by all accounts was the worst chance for people to glimpse its brightness in recorded history.