Pilgrims visiting the asylum

 Every few years, I try to understand Ezra Pound. My latest stab at it involves Peter Ackroyd’s short study of the poet.

One of the things poets do is clean up the tools of language. They use language in new ways that help us imagine new possibilities. That idea is widely held, largely because of Pound. Here he is in Make It New, published in 1934, criticizing his early poetry:

 

I hadn’t in 1910 made a language. I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.

   

Pound’s language focused on images: it was rooted in imagination rather than reason.

He wrote some poems I admire.

But the other side of Pound is so catastrophic it’s barely believable. He was rabidly racist, anti-Semitic and fascist. He made treasonous broadcasts from Rome when the United States was at war with fascist Italy. He wrote countless articles and letters spreading hate and prejudice.

After the war, Pound was locked up in St. Elizabeth’s asylum. Some people thought Pound was faking insanity to avoid charges of treason. Others, including his psychiatrists, thought he was insane.

Two groups of admirers visited Pound regularly: those who admired a poet who had done groundbreaking work and those who wanted to be in the presence of a famous fascist and hate monger.

He was an icon for both kinds of pilgrims.

The state of Pound’s mind fascinated some of his visitors. The American poet Charles Olson found him coherent, correcting dates and quotations in conversations. His lawyers found him incapable of answering questions. William Carlos Williams, a physician as well as poet, noticed that Pound spoke in words and phrases — “no sentence structure worth mentioning.”

The English poet and professor John Wain compared Pound’s mind to a phonograph record:

 

He talked on and on in connected sentences and with perfect logic and persuasiveness; but if anyone interrupted him with a question it simply threw the needle out of the groove, and he fell silent for a moment, passed his hand wearily over his eyes, and then went on talking, starting from a different point.

 

Pound was able to do different things at different times. In late 1961, back in Italy, he descended into silence.

• Source: Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound; London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp. 24 and 95.