Ezra Pound’s Fascist Paradise

Percy Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” No poet sought acknowledgment more enthusiastically than Ezra Pound. No poet legislated so ambitiously or disastrously, either. Pound was the impresario of Modernism. He stripped the Victorian padding from the verse of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, launched magazines and the Imagist movement, and published the first chapters of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” He was also a fascist and fanatical anti-Semite who propagandized on the radio for Mussolini’s regime. After the war, Pound’s friends and fans, Eliot among them, convinced the American authorities that he was not bad, just mad. He was lucky not to be executed as a traitor.