SOURCE: Goldensohn, Barry. “Pound and Antisemitism.” Yale Review 75, no. 3 (June 1986): 399-421.

In the following essay, Goldensohn disagrees with the various rationales often given for Pound's anti-Semitism and that despite the historical tendencies to forgive and forget such indiscretions, Pound's anti-Semitism continues to matter.

It is a puzzling and painful conflict for one who loves Pound's poetry and poetics and admires his role as a generous mentor of poets to attempt to come to terms with his antisemitism, his Fascism, and his glorification of Mussolini (the “Boss”) and Hitler (“a Jeanne d'Arc”).¹ We do not have here a romantic figure of the artist-in-defiance choosing evil or crime like Genet, Rimbaud, or Sade; nor on the other hand do we have here the poet as mass murderer like Sir Walter Ralegh, who in a “pacification campaign” in Ireland is said to have massacred six hundred men and women after their...