The Music of Ezra Pound

 Once you hear him read his own poetry, the music of Ezra Pound's language gets into your bloodstream. His voice is unforgettable: sonorous as the bell of a duomo, reflecting his upbringing in rural Idaho and WASP Philadelphia, but also the England, France and Italy where he lived most of his adult life. The result is strangely Scottish or Irish, and the cadence not unlike the greatest poetry readers of the recorded era: poets like Dylan Thomas, Joseph Brodsky, WB Yeats and Paul Celan.

Ezra Pound: the Wagner of American poetry, arguably the Wagner of 20th century poetry. It's not just the antisemitism or the fascism, it's the grandiosity that makes the politics of horror an inevitability. It's the misbegotten idealism of a man who has no idea how real people live.

Listen to him read Usura, Canto 45 (XLV). Probably his most famous poem. It is not quite a masterpiece: it doesn't need all the stuff about the various artists who didn't need 'usery' to create great works, but disregard that section: it sounds like a prophetic incantation against exploitation: for three minutes, you can imagine Blake inveighing against the satanic mills. But it blames Usura, or usery, for problems that exist even in social conditions of economic fairness. The problem is not usury, the problem is as Isaac Bashevis Singer put it: mankind is a stinker.

Pound wrote it between 1934 and 1936. It is not just a poem against usery, it is a poem against the people thought to practice usery. It is a poem that all but blames Jews for the world's ills. It's exactly Wagner's vision of a world uncorrupted where art is the religion by which people ascend to their highest being. There is a famous composer who's vision is altogether similar to this...

There is one other figure from the 1930s whose voice, vocal cadence and accent is so much like Pound's. It's not Hitler or Mussolini, it's a figure only known to Americans of long memory: Father Charles Coughlin, a would be American dictator who spoke with almost precisely this same affected upper class Irish brough. In a different universe, Ezra Pound became Father Coughlin, doubting the slowness and compromise of democracy, calling the American people toward higher spiritual ideals, and his undoubted charisma propelling him to the office that was probably Coughlin's ultimate prize.

Whatever one thinks of Pound, this is great art, this poetry is great music. Be warned, even if only heard once, it is never forgotten.

Ezra Pound. Canto XLV.