Abstract
This essay examines the ways in which the American émigré Ezra Pound has become a reverence points for the extreme right on both sides of the Atlantic. Feldman and Rinaldi examine how Pound contributed to activism in Britain, America and also Italy, where the recent Casa Pound movement has drawn heavily on his memory. Their essay is important both to the study of fascism and to the on-going debates on the reception of Pound within literary studies too. The Pound case reminds us that fascism is an ideology that can possess profound cultural dynamics, as well as extremist political messages, and was able to attract the considerable intellectual energies of one of the foremost modernist poets.
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Notes
For more on Pound and fascism see, for example, Niccolò Zapponi, L’ltalia di Ezra Pound, (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976)
Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Alex Houen, ‘Ezra Pound: Anti-Semitism, Segregationism, and the ‘Arsenal of Live Thought’, in Terrorism and Modern Literature from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson, ed. Alex Houen et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Matthew Feldman, ‘Ezra Pound’s political faith from first to second generation; or, “It is 1956 Fascism”’, in Erik Tonning et al. (eds), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse (Leiden: Brill, 2014)
For recent studies of ‘transnational fascism’, see Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Transnational Fascism: Cross-Border Relations between Regimes and Movements in Europe, 1922–1939’, East Central Europe 37 (2010), 214–46
Michael Whine, ‘Trans-European trends in right-wing extremism’, in Andrea Mammone et al. eds. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe: From Local to Transnational (London: Routledge, 2012)
Jim Wolfreys, ‘The European Extreme Right in Comparative Perspective’, in Andrea Mammone et al. (eds), Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe (London: Routledge, 2013)
Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 65–79.
Humphrey Carpenter, Ezra Pound: A Serious Character (Faber and Faber, London: 1988), 873–4.
See Archie Henderson, ‘Pound, Sweden and the Nobel Prize’, in Richard Taylor, and Claus Melcihor (eds), Ezra Pound in Europe (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 164.
Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 594–612.
Massimo Bagicalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, New York: 1980), x
Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of Fascism after 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 135–6.
Henderson, “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondencesa (Houston, TX: Private publication, 2012), 509–10.
Noel Stock, ‘Blackout on History’, The European, 7/72 (Feb. 1959), 337
Ezra Pound, trans., ‘In Captivity: Notebook of Thoughts in Ponza and La Maddelena’, Edge 4 (1957), 10–26
Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 444
Ezra Pound, I Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, ed. Demetres Tryphounopoulos et al. (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1988), 251–3.
Kerry Bolton, ‘Ezra Pound’, available online at www.oswaldmosley.com/ezra-pound (last accessed 24 April 2014). For more on Bolton’s extreme right past — including stints with the New Zealand National Front and the shortlived New Zealand Fascist Union — see Paul Spoonley, The Politics of Nostalgia: Racism and the Extreme Right in New Zealand (Dunmore Press: Palmerston North, 1987), 167–71.
Eustace Mullins, Mullins’ New History of the Jews (Staunton, The International Institute of Jewish Studies, 2007), 101.
George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2008), 154.
George Michael, ‘Michael Collins Piper: An American Far Right Emissary to the — Islamic World’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9/1 (2008), 61–78.
Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman (eds), Fascism Critical Concepts in Political Science (Routledge: London, 2004), Vol. I
Aristotle Kallis (ed.), The Fascism Reader (Routledge: London, 2003), 1–42.
Roger Griffin, ‘Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the European New Order 1922–1992’, in Matthew Feldman (ed.), A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2008), 166.
Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Discussion or Inquisition: The Case of Alain de Benoist’, Telos, 98–9 (1993/1994), 54
Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Ashgate: London, 2007)
Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Routledge: London, 2013).
See Matthew Feldman, ‘Make It Crude: Ezra Pound’s Antisemitic Propaganda for the PNF and BUF’, Holocaust Studies, 15/1-2 (2010), 59–77.
Frederico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, Constellations 15/3 (2008), 321.
Anton Shekhovtsov, ‘European Far-Right Music and its Enemies’, in Ruth Wodak, and John E. Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge: London, 2013), 279
CPI unabashedly declares itself to be a fascist movement, despite the fact Italian laws prohibit the formation of explicitly fascist parties. CPI even has an official biography: Domenico Di Tullio, Nessun dolore: una storia di CasaPound (Milano: Rizzoli, 2010).
Daniele Di Nunzio, Emanuele Toscano, Dentro e fuori Casapound. Capire il fascismo del Terzo Millennio (Rome: Armando, 2011)
Anna Castriota and Matthew Feldman, “‘Fascism for the Third Millennium”: An Overview of Language and Ideology in Italy’s CasaPound Movement’, in Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far-Right since 1945 (Stuttgart: Ibidem Press, 2014)
Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Caterina Froio and Matteo Albanese, ‘The appeal of neo-fascism in times of crisis. The experience of CasaPound Italia’, Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 2 (2013), 234–58
Ezra Pound, Lavoro ed usura: tre saggi (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1954), 106–7.
Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1988), 80–110.
Alexander Baron, Eustace Clarence Mullins: Anti-semitic Propagandist or Iconoclast? The World’s Premier Conspiracy Historian on the Jews, the Fed and the New World Order, Including Notes on Global Deception (Info Text Manuscripts: London, 1995)
Adriano Scianca, Ezra fa surf. Come e perché il pensiero di Pound salverà il mondo (Milan: ZERO91, 2013)
Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right Alternatives to Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013).
Pierre-André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 688–703.
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© 2014 Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov
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Feldman, M., Rinaldi, A. (2014). ‘Penny-wise…’: Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Legacy to Fascism. In: Jackson, P., Shekhovtsov, A. (eds) The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137396211_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137396211_2
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