4pQonT

EZRA POUND 339
of a poet and thinker like Ezra Pound makes racialism or antisemitism
impossible. They also betray an ignorance of the writer's
personal relationships, in which he assisted Louis Zukofsky and
other Jews in their artistic and literary careers. They forget that in
the Cantos (XXII and LXXVI) themselves he speaks of Jews
with admiration, and that Jews such as John Cournos have spoken
of him with interest and admiration in their biographies. It is a
charge that should be supported by proof, and up to the present
this has never been done. Facts, not words, should be produced.
"In October, 1945 Ezra Pound wrote to his lawyer: 'I was not
sending axis propaganda but my own, the nucleus of which was in
Brooks Adams' works 40 years ago, and in my own pre-war publications.'
It may be said that the time chosen by Pound to set forth
his personal views was not the most opportune, but this only shows
his sincerity and his high conception of the freedom of speech. By
so doing, he was, in a certain manner, keeping faith with the traditions
of his great country. The Mercure de France, in April, 1949,
was able to adduce irrefutable evidence that the Poet had never
betrayed either his conscience or his country.
"The essence of Ezra Pound's teaching may be summed up in
these words which appeared in an article published in the newspaper
Il Tempo: 'He inveighed against usury.' This is why so many
people believed him to be an antisemite, erroneously identifying a
vicious practice with a whole race. Once this misunderstanding has
been removed no serious grounds for the accusation remain.
"The time has now come, therefore, to set free the Prometheus
Bound, to give Ezra Pound his liberty again, for he would have
nothing to fear from a trial, having always loved his country and
all that there is and has been in it of the purest and the best. To
liberate a poet is not only an act of universal justice; it is above all
an act of homage to world poetry which has in Pound one of its
greatest exponents. The Poet is the freest creature in the universe.
The very essence of poetry is freedom! Pound belongs not only to
the United States but to the whole of humanity. Roosevelt, whose
economic policies Pound attacked, was only a man. Men die, but
poetry lives forever. Beauty and culture are the highest values that
a nation can make its own, for their nationality is universal, their
nation the Universe, the country common to all mankind.