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“Ezra Pound: A Revolutionary Simpleton”

A Review of A. David Moody’s biography Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. I, 1885– 1920. Hitchens acknowledges the contributions to Eliot and Yeats as a mentor and editor but also see evidence of his eventual slide into “the obsessive crank of the declining years, barking obscenities and gibberish over Mussolini’s radio.” The title is a quote from Wyndham Lewis, principle author and editor of BLAST magazine, who rejected fascism as just as Pound was embracing it.

New learning: Pound went to the US Embassy in London in 1918 to oppose the potential drafting of T.S. Eliot into the military saying, “if it was a war for civilization (not merely for democracy) it was folly to shoot, or have shot one of the six or seven Americans capable of contributing to civilization or understanding the word.”

New phrase: il miglior fabbro = the better craftsman (T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland dedication to Ezra Pound)

BLAST magazine was literary publication for the Vorticist movement and was published only twice – in July 1914 and July 1915. Ezra Pound was a contributor to the first edition as was, coincidentally, Rebecca West from the previous essay. The editor, Wyndham Lewis, did much of the writing and illustrations himself. The cover of the first edition was bright pink while the second was a woodblock print from Lewis.