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EZRA POUND 279
injected a note of sanity into the furor about Pound's "anti-
Semitism" in the Spring, 1951 number of his magazine:
"In recent discussions of Pound, his anti-Semitism (for reasons
that are in one way understandable; it is a live issue and one that
carries a tremendous emotional charge) has been magnified out
of all proportion with the place it actually occupies in his work.
William Barrett, for example, in the editorial which inaugurated
'Partisan Review,' symposium on the Bollingen award, quoted
seven lines from the 'Pisan Cantos'—and the only ones out of
118 pages that could possibly be interpreted as anti-Semitic—as
though they were representative of the entire sequence. . . . On
the basis of these seven lines, and with entire disregard of the
courage, the humility, and the love which animates, for the rest,
these Cantos, he proceeded to the assumption that the matter of
the poetry as a whole is 'ugly' and 'vicious!' It is hard to conceive
of a more complete distortion."
Ezra Pound had pointed out some decades before that his critics
would "use any stick to beat me," and the issue of anti-Semitism
in his work is merely one of the desperate measures to which
the liberals resort in their ceaseless efforts to discredit him. In a
number of cases, literary periodicals that defended him were
quickly put out of circulation! He contributed an article to an
intellectual magazine, The European, citing Coke on misprision
of treason. That was the last issue of that publication. Hayden
Carruth wrote a rather favorable essay on Pound for the Summer,
1956 issue of Perspective, U.S.A. This was the last issue of this
periodical, which had been subsidized by the Ford Foundation.
At the first kind mention of Pound, the entire project was abandoned.
He once sent me a telegram to come to Washington and edit a
new magazine called The Spectator. I arrived there, only to find
that The Spectator was no more. Ezra had written an editorial for
the previous issue that referred to Eugene Meyer in rather strong
terms. The Spectator's principal source of revenue was the back
page, which had been taken by the radio and television station,
WTOP. Eugene Meyer owned station WTOP.
Ezra has had the same experience with literary awards. Sco-