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EZRA POUND 29
study of his work, I was forced to take into account the entire
circumstances that had led him to make the broadcasts from
Italy, resulting in his indictment on a charge of treason. I learned
that he could have avoided the indictment by renouncing his American
citizenship, but he had purposely refused to make this sacrifice,
for behind his every act was his loyalty to his country.
It was this inescapable fact that had caused the government
attorneys to place him in the madhouse, rather than to publicly try
a man whose only crime was his unswerving and uncompromising
patriotism. I reflected that I owed my education to three Americans
who were indicted for high treason against duly constituted authority,
although none of the three "traitors" was ever tried on this
charge. I had previously studied at Washington and Lee University,
which had been founded with a grant from George Washington,
whom the British had promised to hang as a traitor, and brought
to its present eminence by Robert E. Lee, who also had been
promised a hangman's noose for the crime of treason.
Washington and Lee are now enshrined in the hearts of their
fellow countrymen, and no one could think of them as traitors.
With the passage of time, and a deeper understanding of the unseen
forces at work that promoted the Second World War, his fellow
citizens will erase for all time the charge of treason laid against
Ezra Pound.
The government of the United States admitted that there was no
case against him when the charges were dropped in 1958. For the
first time, the case for Ezra Pound, which should have been presented
at the trial that the government refused him, is being presented
in this book. In order to do so, it is necessary to recount his
literary career from its inception, for the same ideals and values
that guided him from his student days led to the broadcasts and the
indictment for treason as inevitably as they led to the Cantos. As
everyone who has been privileged to know him can testify, he has
found it impossible to maintain his strict standards of artistic
integrity without also maintaining those standards in his dealings
with that perennial foe of the artist, the State.