Ezra Pound, Poet. Volume III: The Tragic Years 1939-1972

Ezra Pound: Poet #3

by Anthony David Moody

This third and final volume of A. David Moody's critical life of Ezra Pound presents Pound's personal tragedy in a tragic time. The first volumes of Moody's biography have been acclaimed as 'masterly' (Daily Telegraph), 'exceptional' (Literary Review), and 'invaluable' (New York Times Book Review). In this concluding volume, we experience the 1939-1945 World War, and Pound's hubristic involvement in Fascist Italy's part in it; we encounter the grave moral and intellectual error of Pound holding the Jewish race responsible for the war; and his consequent downfall, being charged with treason, condemned as an anti-Semite, and shut up for twelve years in an institution for the insane. Further, we see Pound stripped for life, by his own counsel and wife, of his civil and human rights.

Pound endured what was inflicted upon him, justly and unjustly, without complaint; and continued his lifetime's effort to promote, in and through his Cantos and his translations, a consciousness of a possible humane and just social order. The contradictions run deep and compel, as tragedy does, a steady and unprejudiced contemplation and an answering depth of comprehension.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction

640 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Anthony David Moody is Professor of English at the University of York.

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moody finally jumps the shark here: the book is, as another reviewer puts it, sustained by rage at the injustice done to Pound. The problem is that Moody's sense of this injustice is so absurd as to make the book itself ridiculous. Was Pound guilty of treason? Well, if you'd like to use the legal definition, it's arguable. Moody puts a lot of weight on a few clauses in a few cases, without considering that literally being in the pay of a fascist government in order to produce arguments about why America is run by Jews and should not be in the war probably counts as 'comforting' the enemy, even if the actual content of that propaganda is not aimed specifically at telling American soldiers not to fight. I just think splitting hairs isn't a good idea when your client is Ezra Pound. Moody, on the other hand, would claim that Alan Shapiro is a worse person than Pound because Shapiro didn't think Pound should be awarded prizes for his poetry all because he was literally a Nazi sympathizer.

I mean, come on, A. David. You can disagree with Shapiro in general, but you can't assault him as an immoral monster.

Leaving that aside, Moody also fails in more scholastic ways. His picture of Mussolini and fascist Italy in general is taken entirely from the apologist/revisionist biography by Nicholas Farrell. If you want to reference it, fine, but perhaps look at some alternatives as well, Bosworth or someone. It's hardly surprising that Moody can be sympathetic to Pound's sympathy for the Fascists when he's going on Farrell's unbalanced picture.

Smaller, but indicative of the lack of care shown in this final volume, is Moody's unwillingness to actually read about the things that Pound was reading in anything other than Pound's way. It's one thing to say 'Pound thought that the Kuan Tzu [Guanzi, as the orthography has it now] was an influence on the much earlier thought of Confucius and Mencius, but this is impossible,' another entirely to report Pound's factual errors as truths (see p. 347 for this particular error).

Given the moralistic turn of the humanities, it's unlikely that anyone will do anything to supplement Moody's work for a generation; it would be career suicide. This is a terrible shame. But Moody's readings of the poetry are second to none, and the biography as a whole is a monument of scholarship; Pound's life, no matter what you think of him, is one of the most remarkable of the twentieth century.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the other reviews are by homos, this is a good work of scholarship, as were the other volumes. Whining about reading has not been seemed to be learned out of the precocious college students reading this. Pound is great. Moody is too, Fuck you

[Libycoq]

this is the only volume where Moody's tangents unfurled enough to truly bog me down: the coooonstant sustained outrage over every injustice done by family, acquaintances, and institutions. even in the last 5 pages he's still getting worked up about pound being blackballed from some award.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rest well, Ezra, in your Venetian grave. Ezra Pound lived the Comedia Divina in reverse: Paradise, the years of the young genius; Purgatory, hailed by critics as the greatest American poet since Walt Whitman and simultaneously sowing the seeds of fascism; and Inferno, destroying his own life. Anthony Moody, a sympathetic biographer, turns his attention in the third volume of his Pound trilogy to the war years Ezra spent in Italy, his arrest for treason, extradition to the United States and confinement at St. Elizabeth mental asylum in Washington D.C. for a dozen years, 1946-1958, followed by self-exile in Italy until death. This story is so well known, to Poundians anyway, that Moody chooses to devote much of the volume on the St. Elizabeth years. The "bughouse", as Ezra called it, proved highly fecund. Here he finished two more sections of THE CANTOS, "Thrones" and "Rock-Drill", and held court for America's literati, among them James Dickey, Edith Hamilton, Marianne Moore, H.L. Mencken, and Langston Hughes. He also endorsed nauseating racist and anti-semitic tracts by his white supremacist followers. Even in the loony bin Pound could not escape the contradictions that marred and ultimately ruined his life. Ezra knew it, calling himself "a blown husk that is finished", and "a minor satirist of the age". A sad self-indictment of a glorious career.

[Fnaught · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best of the three. A deeply affecting style breaks out from Moody's neutrality -one out of which the argument for a Pound apologia becomes clear as the sun. (It also looks snug on top of the two other vols; I recc. the complete triforce.)