4pQonT

278 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
small token of gratitude for Pound's assistance to Jewish artists.
The suggestion was passed on, but nothing came of it, because the
artificial flames of hate were still being stoked, years after the
end of the Second World War.
Typical was the statement in Partisan Review by its editor,
William Barrett, that Pound's lines in The Pisan Cantos,
Pétain defended Verdun while Blum
was defending a bidet 18 [.]
"Express a vicious anti-semitic lie." 18
My understanding of "anti-
Semitism" is that it is an expression of hate or prejudice against
the Jews either as a group or as a race. Yet the Jews are not
mentioned in these two lines. When I read them, I had no knowledge
that Blum was Jewish, and only my curiosity as to what
Barrett was driving at led me to check into it. Because he had
called my attention to the fact, I became aware that Blum was a
Jew, yet it was Barrett, not Pound, who had mentioned it. Now,
who is spreading anti-Semitism by bringing up the Jewish issue in
connection with these two lines? It is not Pound, but Barrett, who
forces us to consider the Jewish question, and thus brings in the
issue of "anti-Semitism".
Peter Viereck, whose logic compares favorably with William
Barrett's, wrote in Commentary, April 1, 1951, "Is it anti-poetic
and philistine to feel rather violently about the 'Pisan Cantos'
and other influential neo-fascist revivals when one hears of an
ex-Nazi official boasting this year in Frankfort that, when Jewish
mothers asked him where their missing two-year-old babies went,
he replied, 'Up the chimney!' "
In contrast to this sort of hysteria, Babette Deutsch, the eminent
Jewish poet and critic, has made one of the most sweeping comments
on Pound's influence as a teacher, in The Yale Literary
Magazine, December, 1958, saying, "The major poets of the
twentieth century have acknowledged publicly their debt to Pound,
the teacher."
Perhaps Peter Viereck modestly does not include himself in
this category. Frederick Morgan, publisher of The Hudson Review,