Nothing like starting off with a nice controversial Poet; with Pound you get the amazing writing coupled with his Axis sympathies during World War II, his anti-semitism, his arrest for treason at the end of the war, and his incarceration in a mental hospital.

This is a man who Time magazine described as  “a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children.”  Yet he seemed to do well by his fellow writers and friends. Hemmingway wrote that Pound  “defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying … he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.”

Pound is one of those many artists where we have to ask ourselves if it’s possible (or is it right) to separate the artist from the art.

All bizarre facts about Pound aside, what better way to start than with a reminder of the power that words can have?

Commission by Ezra Pound #

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,

Go also to the nerve wracked, go to the enslaved by convention,

Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

Go as a great wave of cool water,

Bear my contempt of oppressors.

 

Speak against unconscious oppression,

Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,

Speak against bonds.

Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,

Go to the women in suburbs.

Go to the hideously wedded,

Go to them whose failure is concealed,

Go to the unluckily mated,

Go to the bought wife,

Go to the woman entailed.

 

Go to those who have delicate lust,

Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,

Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world,

Go with your edge against this,

Strengthen the subtle cords,

Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.

 

Go in a friendly manner,

Go with an open speech.

Be eager to find new evils and new good,

Be against all forms of oppression.

Go to those who are thickened with middle age,

To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family___

Oh how hideous it is

To see three generations of one house gathered together!

It is like an old tree with shoots,

And with some branches rotted and falling.

 

Go out and defy opinion,

Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.

Be against all sorts of mortmain.

 

 

Pound Poems & Translations __The Library of America

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