Ezra Pound will forever remain controversial. What most critics agree on is that he was a central figure in the world of literary High Modernism: a distinguished poet (though some prefer his earlier to his later work) and a brilliant and generous networker who gave timely practical and artistic help to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis, among many others.

However, Pound’s anti-Semitism, his sympathy for fascism, and his political and economic ideas in general have earned him (in many cases, rightly) harsh denunciation. While living in Italy during World War II he made ill-advised radio broadcasts that were treated by the American government as traitorous. After the war he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., for eleven years. Upon his release he returned to Italy, where he spent the rest of his life.

In the academy today, attacks on Pound are de rigeur. A few literary critics with conservative sensibilities, including Denis Donoghue and the late Hugh Kenner, have attempted to defend large aspects of Pound’s achievement as a poet, but this has also earned them vilification.

A few other independent voices have questioned the campaign against Pound. A leading literary critic with no ties to conservatism, Marjorie Perloff, has recently stated: “I still believe—and I speak here as a refugee from Hitler whose family fled the morning of the Anschluss—that Pound’s “fascism”—most of it completely nonsensical, juvenile, and failing to understand how government works—was not nearly as dangerous as Heidegger’s willed, conscious, perfectly ‘reasoned’ fascism.”

The incoherence and extremism of Pound’s political ideas have caused his influence on American conservative thought to be minimal.

• Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971.
• Donoghue, Denis. Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1965.