Ezra Pound’s Enjambment from Italian Fascism to American Neo-Fascism

The extensive evidence that Pound was a committed and influential propagandist for fascism and, by 1935, a hardened antisemite is typically dismissed by Pound’s defenders on grounds that he was more than just a fascist and racist. Inevitably, fascists are more than just fascists: Mussolini was a journalist; Hitler a painter; and Quisling a military officer. All also led fascist movements and contributed to the Holocaust. The same is true of fascist writers: Celine was initially a travelling doctor and Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature long before he gifted it to Goebbels in 1943. People contain multitudes; and yes, fascists are also people. Somehow these truths have wholly eluded Ezra Pound’s hagiographers. Further proof is therefore adduced in this article of Pound’s central role in the launching of postwar American fascism. Short case studies of Eustace Mullins, John Kasper and Matthias Koehl — who all visited Pound during his institutionalisation at St Elizabeths — makes plain that Pound became more than even a leading poet and fascist propagandist after 1945: he was also a leading neo-Nazi. This can no longer be denied. Pound took ideas seriously; when are we going to take his core ideas seriously?