A Conversation with Ezra Pound

On April 18, the Department of Justice dismissed a 13-year-old indictment against Ezra Pound, and a week later the authorities at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington placed this aging poet on an outpatient status. On the afternoon of April 30, Pound drove to Richmond in the company of Harry Meacham, president of the Virginia Poetry Society, and for a little more than two hours we talked together in the oddly chaste and dulcet surroundings of the Rotunda Club here.

This account of that causerie—it surely was nothing so formal as an interview—should be qualified at the outset: We did not talk serious politics. It is useless to talk serious politics with Ezra Pound. He is the last statesman of a lost cause—a cause lost a thousand years ago—and most of his enemies are dust. Talking with him, it is difficult to separate his live antagonists from the dead ones, the Rothschilds of 1750 from their counterparts two centuries later; and there is this problem for the ignoramus, meaning me, that when Pound touches a subject he does not so much touch it as embrace it. His mind is a river that holds ten thousand years of sand, but it deposits little sediment in washing over the untutored listener. Coleridge once remarked that the best poetry is that which is only generally, and not precisely, understood; and what I am groping to say is that I do not understand Pound even generally. Acknowledging that he is “anti-Semitic,” I venture the positive assertion that Pound’s anti-Semitism never will inspire the faintest urge in anyone to put a torch to a synagogue; a less effective rabble-rouser could not be conceived: The rabble would not understand a word that he says.

JJ

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James Jackson Kilpatrick

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On April 18, the Department of Justice dismissed a 13-year-old indictment against Ezra Pound, and a week later the authorities at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington placed this aging poet on an outpatient status. On the afternoon of April 30, Pound drove to Richmond in the company of Harry Meacham, president of the Virginia Poetry Society, and for a little more than two hours we talked together in the oddly chaste and dulcet surroundings of the Rotunda Club here.

This account of that causerie—it surely was nothing so formal as an interview—should be qualified at the outset: We did not talk serious politics. It is useless to talk serious politics with Ezra Pound. He is the last statesman of a lost cause—a cause lost a thousand years ago—and most of his enemies are dust. Talking with him, it is difficult to separate his live antagonists from the dead ones, the Rothschilds of 1750 from their counterparts two centuries later; and there is this problem for the ignoramus, meaning me, that when Pound touches a subject he does not so much touch it as embrace it. His mind is a river that holds ten thousand years of sand, but it deposits little sediment in washing over the untutored listener. Coleridge once remarked that the best poetry is that which is only generally, and not precisely, understood; and what I am groping to say is that I do not understand Pound even generally. Acknowledging that he is “anti-Semitic,” I venture the positive assertion that Pound’s anti-Semitism never will inspire the faintest urge in anyone to put a torch to a synagogue; a less effective rabble-rouser could not be conceived: The rabble would not understand a word that he says.