In 1945 Ezra Pound faced the death penalty for the crime of treason. For a poet who had declared that there were only ‘a few hundred people… capable of recognising what I am about’, the matter of being understood (and misunderstood) had become a matter of life and death. A grand three-volume biography by A David Moody, the final volume of which is published this month, traces Pound’s path from the courthouse in Washington DC.

Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Idaho in 1885. As soon as Pound arrived in London from the US (in 1908), the young firebrand wanted to demolish the polite conventions of Victorian verse. His poems were modern in form but not in content. He used ancient languages and mythic allegories to address pressing matters such as governance and justice. His epic 50-year suite The Cantos runs to over 800 pages of verse in a mixture of English, Medieval Provencal, Italian, Latin and Mandarin. Through its very obscurity, Pound’s poetry offered a radical new direction. His journal Blast advocated Vorticism (a British variant of Futurism); behind the scenes, Pound arranged grants for indigent modernist artists such as James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, while not being any better off than they were. Hemingway, Eliot and Yeats (among others) considered Pound an invaluable critic. They asked him to edit their writing and consented to the drastic changes he suggested. His abrasiveness became a trademark. In one announcement, relating to one of the other journals he edited, he declared:

‘Exile will appear three times per annum until I get bored of producing it. It will contain matters of interest to me personally, and is unlikely to appeal to any save those disgusted with the present state of letters in England…’ After a spell in Paris, Pound arrived in Italy, where he settled in Rapallo in 1924. Moody describes how Pound’s poetry and politics converged in Mussolini’s Italy. Pound began to fixate on economics and banking as the root of war and inequality. He wrote numerous cantos distilling John Quincy Adams’s views on government, Jeffersonian economics and nineteenth-century banking theory. Sales of successive volumes of The Cantos slumped dramatically. Even his few dedicated readers admitted that his poetry needed extensive commentary and translation to be intelligible.

Pound, along with many Italians, saw Mussolini as a strong stable alternative to encroaching communism and unregulated capitalism. In the face of widespread poverty and unemployment during the Great Depression, fascism (especially in its Italian form) seemed a beneficent third way. Anti-Semitism did not play a role in Italian fascist policy until 1938, under the direction of Nazi Germany. Moody records Pound’s campaign of hectic letter- and essay-writing. He assailed US senators and committees with directives on banking regulation and taxation. He even had an audience with Il Duce. International usury became an obsession for him. Many of Pound’s anti-Semitic statements derive from his conflation of his hatred of capital exploitation with casual assumptions about Jewish control of world finances. Taking a provocative stand on artistic matters had been Pound’s stock-in-trade for decades, and he failed to see that in wartime Europe race-baiting was a matter of life and death. During the Second World War, Pound gave a series of radio talks in favour of the fascist government. The authorities wanted talk of cultural Enlightenment. What they got were lectures on economic theory laced with anti-Semitism, which apparently baffled listeners. Pound’s writings and broadcasts through fascist-controlled channels were not fascist propaganda, but Pound’s own blend of propaganda, ridicule, invective and poetry, which happened occasionally to align closely to official propaganda. Pound’s rants about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jew bankers being behind Roosevelt and Churchill did not reach the American people, but they were heard by Allied intelligence services and they were taking notes.