Ezra Pound, great poet, dead

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33064, 3 November 1972, Page 9

Ezra Pound, great poet, dead

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) VENICE (Italy), Nov. 2. Ezra Pound, one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century, who was accused of treason against the United States in World War II has died in Venice two days after his eighty-seventh birthday.

Pound, who died last night of an intestinal obstruction after being rushed to Venice’s Civil Hospital at midnight on Tuesday, had been living in exile in Italy since 1958 when he was released from 12 years in a Washington mental institution.

Pound, who came to Europe as an angry young man in 1907, armed with a deep classical scholarship, several languages and a sharp but eloquent tongue, became one of the formative influences of twentieth century literature. Men like Ernest Heminway, James Joyce, and Robert Frost paid tribute to his influence, and T. S. Eliot gave him his famous poem, “The Wasteland,” to edit. Pound responded by slashing it down to half its length, the form in which it is known today. Pound’s lifetime work, the "Cantos,” began to appear in 1925. The “Cantos” are mono-

logues on the meaning of history, and are epic and fuguelike in structure. He was also a critic of influence and eminence.

As a poet, he was noted, not only for the subjects of his poetry, but for his experimental usage of language (sometimes several languages in the one poem) and for his metric virtuosity.

During World War 11, Pound made pro-Mussolini broadcasts to America in which he attacked the United States bitterly. He had then lived in Italy since 1924. Besides being Fascist, he expressed anti-Semitic views and was earlier an adherent of unorthodox economic views, in which the thinking of Major C. H. Douglas, inventor of Social Credit, played a part. He was charged with treason in 1943 for his pro-Mus-solini broadcasts, captured by American troops in Italy and placed behind barbed wire in a detention camp before being taken to the United States for trial in 1946. After the war he denied that he ever said anything in his Rome radio war-time broadcasts after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that ran counter to his conscience or his duties as an American citizen, but he never got a, chance to defend himself in court.

On the eve of his trial he was examined by a medical commission, found paranoid

and insane, and placed in the mental hospital as unfit to stand trial. He was to remain there forl2 years. He was occasionally visited by poet friends and his wife came to live near the hospital to visit him. He continued to write poetry. “How could anyone live in America outside a mental home?” he asked after rejoin-

ing his family in Italy in 1958. In a 1959 interview he denied being an anti-Semite, said that socialism equalled imbecility, and that Mussolini had the merit of following the American President, Andrew Jackson, in opposing “the ' tyranny of the national debt.” In 1961, he emerged from retirement in North Italy to travel down to Rome and sit on the platform at a meeting

organised by the Italian neoFascist Party and attended by British pre-war Fascist leader. Sir Oswald Mosley. But after that he withdrew totally from the public eye, apart from an appearance at the Spoleto “Festival of Two Worlds” in 1965 when he read modern poetry to a theatre audience. Since then his appearances have been confined to motoring trips in the countryside around Venice and walks through Venice.

He ceased to write in 1963. He leaves a son in England and a daughter, Mary, who lives in a castle near Merano. Italy, and is the wife of Prince Boris Rachewilz, an archeologist. The Princess (immediately left for Venice last night after being informed of her father’s death.

Tall, white-bearded and aquiline in appearance. Pound had returned to the United States only once for a brief farewell visit in 1969 after his release from Saint Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington in 1958. By then he had entered the state of almost total silence which marked his last years, refusing to answer questions to journalists or even friends when he received them.

. He spent the last 12 years [of his life in a small, twostorey house near Venice’s I Grand Canal in a poor (quarter of the city, attended only by his housekeepercompanion, Mrs Olga Rudge.