Tuesday 5 November 2019

Ezra Pound on France, Italy and Sacred Empire


More from the F.B.I. file on Pound. The Bureau’s translation of a wartime broadcast made in French, aimed at Vichy. I haven’t found the original document; but Feldman reproduces it.

Begins with an interesting statement of his Europeanism; collapses into the usual invective; then ends with “Rome was reborn. The Sacred Empire was reborn”; i.e., the empire of antiquity was reborn in the Holy Roman Empire; and the H.R.E. was reborn in Mussolini. More of Pound’s modernist Ghibellinism. So I think anyway.

Source: Matthew Feldman, “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview,” Journal of Modern Literature, 35.2 (winter, 2012), p. 93 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.83).

Related to Pound’s Ghibellinism:

Contributions by Guy Davenport and Boris de Rachewiltz to Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound (London, 1969);

Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Ezra Pound, the Last Ghibelline,” Journal of Modern Literature, 16.4 (Spring, 1990), pp. 511–533 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831417);

Robert Casillo, “Ezra Pound, L. A. Waddell, and the Aryan Tradition of ‘The Cantos,’” Modern Language Studies, 15.2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 65–81 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3194433).

James Jesus Angleton on Ezra Pound

In 1943 the F.B.I. interviewed James Jesus Angleton in connection with Ezra Pound. Below is a large extract from the report of that interview.

’43 was a crucial year for both men. Pound was indicted in absentia for treason; Angleton was recruited to O.S.S. division X-2 by his former professor Norman Holmes Pearson, thus beginning his counterintelligence career. Plenty ink has been spilled on Angleton’s early and continuing interest in poetry and lit. crit.; no less on Pound’s treasonous political interventions in wartime Italy; but there are some interesting things in this report: e.g. Angleton’s sympathy for Pound’s economics.


Source: https://archive.org/details/EzraPoundFBI, pp. 13–6. I’ve made and square-bracketed one spelling correction. The rest of the report’s chaotic orthography remains intact.


Related: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/04/29/james-angleton-and-ezra-pound/.