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338 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
the inmates are dangerous lunatics; he, the artist, the man of
culture, the messenger of the spiritual value of knowledge, the
'priest of uncreated beauty,' to use Holderlin's definition of the
poet. It may be said of this great poet, and supreme artist, or
craftsman, as Eliot calls him without further qualification, that he
is paying the penalty for teaching men the road by which to reach
the divine ideal: the ideal of truth unblemished, without artifice,
without hypocrisy. Prometheus Bound!
"Unanswerable evidence has now been produced that Ezra
Pound never spoke or wrote against America, never urged his
compatriots to be enemies of their country, whose democratic
principles and whose noblest traditions he extolled to the utmost.
Camillio Pellizzi has furnished undeniable proof of this aspect of
his mental outlook. Ezra Pound has always remained faithful to
the ethical and juridical principles of the American Constitution;
indeed, he had laid such stress on the classical form of the typically
American conception of liberty as one would hardly expect to find
in a humanist of the broadest outlook whose all-embracing mind
soars to the highest and freest flights in the world of history and
culture.
"In our own opinion, speaking as a disinterested reader and
critic, we would say that the great purpose of his ethical and
economic teaching is revealed by his uncompromising stand for the
principles of Jefferson, John Adams and the American Constitution;
it is in the light of this objective that his criticism of 'usurocracy'
should be considered.
"In this he seems to us to adopt an attitude that is excessively
puritanical and rigid, but it is an attitude based on the most scrupulous
respect of a perfectly coherent conception of morality and
civic duty. All the rest is secondary. His attacks on Roosevelt are
incidental. The poet was fully entitled to hold his own opinions.
What we must do is to obtain a grasp of the whole economic and
moral philosophy of Ezra Pound, though we might be asking too
much if we expected the verity of his poetry in all its vital and
psychological aspects to be fully understood.
"From other quarters Ezra Pound has been accused of racial
prejudice and antisemitism. But those who make such absurd
charges forget that the very logic of the broad humanistic culture