4pQonT

EZRA POUND 265
Henry Seidel Canby, editor of The Saturday Review of Literature,
displayed the characteristic accuracy and grace with which
our leading "litteratti" treated their historic enemy, Ezra Pound.
He wrote editorially in the issue of December 15, 1945, "The
false scholarship, the excessive eccentricity, and the confused
thought of much of his poetical work show something less than
greatness . . . He was a traitor . . . Pound of the broadcasts,
the prose pamphlets and private letters, was a muddled and
mediocre mind, easily deluded by childish fallacies in government
and economics."
Canby set a standard for the vituperation of Pound that was
difficult for his successors on The Saturday Review, Norman
Cousins and Harrison Smith, to maintain, but they did their best.
Pound continued to work on his Cantos while he was imprisoned
at Pisa, and the ones completed there were published as The Pisan
Cantos. A recent news story states that this book is now one of
the texts at the Aspen Institute, where such as Adlai Stevenson
improve their minds. It would be interesting to observe the effect
on these business and political leaders of lines such as,
and if theft be the main motive in government
in a large way
there will certainly be minor purloinments 1 [.]
The sponsor of former President Truman's political career was
Boss Pendergast of Kansas City, who stole forty million dollars
and died in jail.
Television viewers are familiar with Mr. Bennett Cerf as the
witty and urbane judge on the program "What's My Line?" He
has not always been so poised, notably when he considered the
case of Ezra Pound. Although he had made a fortune from his
Modern Library series, Mr. Cerf found the Second World War
a harrowing experience. The grim hand of Nazism came perilously
close to his comfortable book-lined den on Madison Avenue,
where he sat tormenting his brain into devising more effective
ways of defending democracy.
He was particularly aware of the menace to civilization as
he had known it, as presented by the personage of Ezra Pound.