Skip to main content
  • 254 Accesses

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. For more on Pound and fascism see, for example, Niccolò Zapponi, L’ltalia di Ezra Pound, (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

    Google Scholar 

  3. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  4. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  5. 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  7. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 65–79.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  9. Humphrey Carpenter, Ezra Pound: A Serious Character (Faber and Faber, London: 1988), 873–4.

    Google Scholar 

  10. See Archie Henderson, ‘Pound, Sweden and the Nobel Prize’, in Richard Taylor, and Claus Melcihor (eds), Ezra Pound in Europe (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 164.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 594–612.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Massimo Bagicalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, New York: 1980), x

    Google Scholar 

  13. Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of Fascism after 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 135–6.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Henderson, “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondencesa (Houston, TX: Private publication, 2012), 509–10.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Noel Stock, ‘Blackout on History’, The European, 7/72 (Feb. 1959), 337

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ezra Pound, trans., ‘In Captivity: Notebook of Thoughts in Ponza and La Maddelena’, Edge 4 (1957), 10–26

    Google Scholar 

  17. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 444

    Google Scholar 

  18. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  19. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Eustace Mullins, Mullins’ New History of the Jews (Staunton, The International Institute of Jewish Studies, 2007), 101.

    Google Scholar 

  21. George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2008), 154.

    Google Scholar 

  22. George Michael, ‘Michael Collins Piper: An American Far Right Emissary to the — Islamic World’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9/1 (2008), 61–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman (eds), Fascism Critical Concepts in Political Science (Routledge: London, 2004), Vol. I

    Google Scholar 

  24. Aristotle Kallis (ed.), The Fascism Reader (Routledge: London, 2003), 1–42.

    Google Scholar 

  25. 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.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Discussion or Inquisition: The Case of Alain de Benoist’, Telos, 98–9 (1993/1994), 54

    Google Scholar 

  27. Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Ashgate: London, 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Routledge: London, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  29. See Matthew Feldman, ‘Make It Crude: Ezra Pound’s Antisemitic Propaganda for the PNF and BUF’, Holocaust Studies, 15/1-2 (2010), 59–77.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Frederico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, Constellations 15/3 (2008), 321.

    Google Scholar 

  31. 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

    Google Scholar 

  32. 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).

    Google Scholar 

  33. Daniele Di Nunzio, Emanuele Toscano, Dentro e fuori Casapound. Capire il fascismo del Terzo Millennio (Rome: Armando, 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  34. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  35. 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

    Google Scholar 

  36. Ezra Pound, Lavoro ed usura: tre saggi (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1954), 106–7.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1988), 80–110.

    Google Scholar 

  38. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Adriano Scianca, Ezra fa surf. Come e perché il pensiero di Pound salverà il mondo (Milan: ZERO91, 2013)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right Alternatives to Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  41. Pierre-André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  42. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 688–703.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Copyright information

© 2014 Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

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

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137396211_2

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48453-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39621-1

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics