Was Ezra Pound crazy? Does it matter any more? Read his words yourself.

Doob, Leonard W., ed., “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II (Greenwood Press, Contributions in American Studies, #37, 1st ed., 1st printing, 1978). ISBN 0-313-20057-2. The foreword says, “The best reason for publishing Ezra Pound’s Italian broadcasts may be the simplest. Thousands of people have heard about them, scores have been affected by them, yet but a handful has ever heard or read them. Here they are.” Since his death in 1972, Ezra Pound- born on this day in 1885- has slipped into history’s embrace and people do not much know the influence he possessed before World War II, or the controversy he caused after it. Far from the sunny, affably clueless radio postcards of P.G. Wodehouse, Pound had an agenda and he was determined to push it. Fascist radio was all too happy to help. This book is a singular contribution to the history of the war era and understanding the life of Ezra Pound. Hardcover, no dustjacket as issued, Green boards, fine condition. Octavo, 465 pp. HBB price: $50.

*****

Sixty years ago this month, the American poet Ezra Pound was released from a federal mental hospital after thirteen years’ confinement and a near-trial for treason after World War II.

How to square his personal and political views with his poetic genius is as vexing as loving Wagner’s music but hating his similar hates is to operaphiles. Reviewing a new book on Pound, The Nation notes that, as Pound faced trial for his Italian radio rants,

Here, another strategy was necessary. Pound had clearly forfeited the role he’d long cultivated, as the visionary leader of a political and cultural vanguard. But perhaps he could be presented as another, equally familiar archetype: the brilliant poet touched by madness. 

Was Pound really mentally ill? Or had he been faking it all along? In his influential The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths (1984), the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey claimed that Pound’s lawyer, Julien Cornell, in cahoots with Dr. Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths, conspired to present an eccentric and egocentric but essentially sane individual as a madman in order to preserve his reputation and, possibly, save his life. 

It’s true that, if convicted, Pound could well have faced the death penalty: A number of fascist and Nazi collaborators, including Britain’s William Joyce, Norway’s Vidkun Quisling, and France’s Pierre Laval, were executed for treason by their home countries. Cornell decided early on that having his client declared mentally unfit to stand trial was the wisest course. The gambit worked: The jury at Pound’s sanity hearing took only four minutes to decide that the poet was “of unsound mind.” 

The price of Pound’s survival, as Swift sees it, was a public renunciation of his authority as a writer and thinker. Having spent decades setting himself up as an expert not only in literature but in politics, economics, history, anthropology, and Sinology, among other fields, Pound was now admitting that he lacked the mental competence to stand trial. The Cantos was meant to be “a poem containing history” that synthesized all Pound knew and believed into an epic masterpiece that would help put civilization on the right track in the 20th century. Now it was used as an exhibit demonstrating its author’s incoherence. 

Before Pound’s sanity hearing, Cornell presented extracts from The Cantos that the poet had composed during his incarceration in Pisa to four expert psychiatrists as “evidence of his mental condition.” On the stand, one of them, Dr. Wendell Muncie, testified that, on the evidence of this and Pound’s other writings, he judged that “there has been for a number of years a deterioration of the mental processes.” Here was Pound’s own putative masterpiece held up as proof of his disintegration.

A facinating audio re-enactment of the Pound programs, from Doob’s book, is here:

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