"The Ezra Pound Problem"

And how Robert Anton Wilson and some other poets dealt with it

“What does it matter what you say about people?” - Marlene Dietrich, as “Tana,” at the end of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958)

Around a month ago I was checking out guitars in a local shop. The kid who worked there thought I was somebody, but I assured him I wasn’t. He got around to asking me who my influences were and I mentioned a bunch of guys, and said that, as a very young person who knew nothing, I liked Ted Nugent. He didn’t know who that was. I told him about how I had no idea as a kid about Nugent’s personality because there just wasn’t enough media that covered this stuff when I was copying licks off vinyl records.¹ Now there’s too much. I realized the kid still didn’t know who Nugent was, other than some guy who influenced me. Why had I danced around the answer? Now that there’s an open fireplug of information 24/7, we can find out quite a lot about our influences. I found out too much. “Ehhh…I found out Nugent’s politics were about 180 from mine.”

“Ohh.”

“Yea.”

Later I realized I’d also mentioned being influenced by Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore, and Dave Mustaine. All these guys have track records uniquely personal to them that make me a tad squeamish. For example, if one wishes to - and I seem to have sort of “accidentally” found out about it because of Internet - one can make the argument that Clapton’s entire career was done in racist blackface.² Blackmore just seems to have been a right winger, not a big deal. I have a bunch of stories about him being a really callous jerk, but I still love his playing. His unpleasantness hangs around his playing nonetheless. I can’t forget or “un-know” things. Mustaine seems really arrogant and confused to me, but I love him more for the other guys he hired to play in his band.

Why do I care about all this? I’d like to not care, but I think this is a part of being a consumer of media where too much information has been revealed, and we have developed our own ideas about how people ought to be treated, including ourselves and our aspirations to be a better person. Is ignorance bliss? Naw. That’s no way to deal with it. You have to face your artistic heroes and their fuck-ups, and maybe it comes down to A.) What they’ve done is unforgivable; I will no longer engage with their art, painful as this decision is; or B.) They’re human just like I am. They screwed-up royally, or have something wrong with their personality, but I still love their art.

Is there a C?

(Botticelli’s Aphrodite, Pound’s favorite goddess)

Within the last two weeks I was reading some very old notecards I’d made from readings on certain topics. I found some notes from Richard Kostelanetz, a lifelong New York writer who wrote some wonderfully critical stuff about the “New York Intellectuals”, calling them a “Mob” among other things. In this Kostelanetz agrees with Robert Anton Wilson, but Kostelanetz is himself Jewish and never left New York and has the “receipts” for this thesis. In his Political Essays, Kostelanetz has a six pager after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and he defends Thomas against Hill.³ To me, this is just a flat bad take, but only given the subsequent history of Thomas on the SCOTUS. Hell, I’m wrong like this quite often, but Thomas seems so egregious to me in 2026 I was saying to myself, “Richard…how could you have been so wrong?” In 1992, I think I believed Hill, but probably for the wrong reasons. It was roughly similar to Blasey-Ford and Beer Kavanaugh’s regrettable rise to the SCOTUS.

Not long after that, I’m studying a very heady topic that I still don’t feel like I understand: Time. What is it, and how does the brain make sense of it? I had a note from someone talking about the neural correlates that underpin the perceptual mechanisms for our understanding of temporality. One of the people who thought we would understand this: Jeffrey Epstein.⁴ I had zero idea of who this guy was when I made the note; Epstein, it turns out, was a very close friend of the editor-agent of a slew of books that sought to make scientific ideas “hot” for the general lay intellectual public, John Brockman. And Brockman himself was of course caught up with Epstein.

Right after this, I’m reading notes on what I think of as the Ezra Pound Problem (which I will explain shortly), and one note was on the necessity of overcoming in-group vs. out-group behavior as seen in chimps, other primates, and, of course, the homo sapiens. Here’s the note I scrawled: “Can we transcend our monkey-hood and talk about both the bad aspects of someone's behavior and our aesthetic reasons for concentrating on the WORK, rather than this fungibility problem? Is it only an aesthetic stance; are we declaring ourselves as not part of in-group/out-group primate behavior?” Still grappling with this one - hence this entire article - and this note was from reading The Folly of Fools, by Robert Trivers, who died recently.⁵ The Einstein of evolutionary biology, an inveterate pot smoker and onetime best friends with Huey Newton. Trivers, a white guy, rode shotgun overnight with the Panthers in Oakland as they sought to prevent police violence being inflicted upon the black population there. Trivers is an endlessly fascinating thinker and character for me: an anti-authoritarian who was always a bit mentally ill, but clearly a genius.

Aaaand…it was relatively recently - last eight months? - when I found out Trivers was another friend of Epstein’s. Mein GOTT!

The “Ezra Pound Problem”

I’d been looking for a name for this issue, in a desultory way, for a long time. Recently my colleague in Robert Anton Wilson fandom, Tom Jackson, argued that Wilson seems a bit contradictory in that he was a great acolyte of Ezra Pound despite his unfathomably vile antisemitism, while Wilson dismissed the prolific classic science fiction writer Poul Anderson for Anderson’s pro-Vietnam, pro-cops at the 1968 Democratic National Convention stance. Jackson, not pro-Vietnam or police riot, defends Anderson because fellow critics have held up Anderson as a great science fiction writer, and for other reasons.

Tom writes, “Applying the ‘Ezra Pound’ rule, it seems that Poul Anderson may be a valuable writer.”⁶

The “Ezra Pound Rule” sounded like it might be the term I’d been looking for, but yesterday in the shower I realized the “Ezra Pound Problem” seems even better, because…it really does seem like a problem. As Wilson wrote of Pound in 1960:

Two statements which I am arrogant enough to call “facts” must be placed on record in any intelligent discussion of Pound: 1.) He is a great poet and a great thinker; 2.) He has deliberately and consistently supported fascism, anti-Semitism and other vicious systems and attitudes for 30 years now, and continues to do so.

You can almost divide the contemporary intelligentsia into two parts: those who refuse, obstinately, to recognize the first of those facts, and those who, with equal obstinacy, try to avoid recognizing the second of those facts. This is only human, and quite forgivable. Placed together, those facts make a paradox which is both tragic and highly alarming. Most of us prefer not to face that paradox, and we reduce Pound to one part of it and ignore the other part.⁷

The Ezra Pound Problem in General: that conundrum faced by any of us when confronted by a favorite artist’s bad behavior, whatever it was. We make ongoing negotiations with this.

The Ezra Pound Problem in Particular: What any of us who like Ezra Pound’s work does with his ugliness. I’m mostly interested in what other poets and writers have thought about this, and some critics who seem compellingly informed.

“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II

This volume, edited by Leonard W. Doob, contains transcripts of the radio broadcasts Pound made in Italy, directed at US troops. I shelve my copy of Rants and Incendiary Tracts⁸ next to it. It’s overwhelmingly informative about Pound’s…Disease?⁹ Stupidity? Hatefulness? Massive mistake? At the end of his life he called it ignorance. A massive mistake he got carried away with. He asked forgiveness. I think of all of it as something like when a great poet makes a mistake, it’s bound to be an unfathomably bad one. It is.

In an appendix, Doob writes:

It is difficult to be objective about these broadcasts, but they can be considered a demotic expression of what Pound has been saying for years. The subject remains the same. The opinions are the old opinions. Pound sees old-fashioned “Yankee” independence and craftsmanship everywhere on the wane…Certain specific references, however, are new, those to “the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers,” to “Franklin Finklestein Roosevelt,” to “kikes,” “sheenies,” and “the oily people.” Also new are Pound’s commendation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the most notorious of contemporary tracts purportedly revealing a Jewish or Zionist plot against the foundations of Western civilization) and his remarks that history is “keenly analyzed” in Mein Kampf.¹⁰

These speeches got Pound busted, apprehended, accused of treason, and locked in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, DC, for 13 years. As I write this it’s May 4, so lemme see if Ez made a radio dealio on that date…ah! Yep: 1942, May 4: speech titled “Universality.” It literally begins:

The Bolshevik anti-morale comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever codified. The Talmud is the one and only begetter of the Bolshevik system.¹¹

Kept locked by the Allies in a cage with an open ceiling, Pound wrote on scraps of paper, and had some sort of breakdown.¹² These writings are known as The Pisan Cantos and fellow poets awarded him the first Bollingen Prize - sort of a Nobel of poetry - for it. Wha? All I can say, if you’re piqued: read these poems. They’re numbers 74 to 84. Who awarded the treasonous Pound this major award in 1948? Poets with names such as Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, WH Auden, and TS Eliot. Why? The critic Richard Elman (not the Joyce biographer) said, “Because he represented the ultimate in the mandarin culture they were trying to preserve and promote.”¹³ The Bollingen jury explained further: “To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest.”¹⁴ Aye: these poems must be pretty damned good to overcome telling the American troops about to face death and dismemberment that they’re fighting for “Stinky Roosenstein.”

The Racist Who Touts His “Good Black Friend”

We all know this thing. Making things extra difficult is Pound going out of his way to help anti-fascists and Jews whose Art he thought was important: he helped Louis Zukofsky. He sought money and support and patronage for Hemingway, Joyce, cummings, Frost, William Carlos Williams, on and on. One the most mind-blowing aspects of this weird story: back in Italy, in the late 1960s, Pound had slowly realized how egregious his fuck-up was, and he turned silent. He wouldn’t speak. Allen Ginsberg visited him and told Pound, basically, so what? You fucked up! You changed poetry forever and we’re all in debt to you. And he danced around in his Hari Krishna clothes, played Pound recordings of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, told him about mind-expanding drugs.¹⁵ I don’t think Pound’s conviviality is any garden-variety of “my good black friend” that racists pull; I suspect it’s weirder and far more nuanced than this, and space and your attention are already being taxed.

RAW and Pound

To address Tom Jackson’s bit about Wilson’s lifelong love of Pound, while fully acknowledging the profound ugliness, Wilson was very clear that not only did he love Pound’s reinvention of Modernist poetry with the ideogrammic method Pound developed from a creative misreading of Ernest Fenollosa’s fecund (mis?)interpretation of Chinese writing, but Wilson thought Pound was onto something important with his questioning of the foundations of value, money, economics. And Wilson was voluminous in his writing about these topics.

Wilson, I think, had an emotional relationship with his reading of Pound, since he was 16 years old. He continued to read Pound throughout his life.¹⁶ This emotional relationship with the massive corpus of Pound’s gives at times, let us say, an inconsistency of appraisals over the years. It seems to me the nature of emotional commitment and the human nervous system, and while I seem to be trying a “gotcha” I’m doing anything but that. I merely find the case of surpassing interest, and it addresses something, I think, about us and our human nature, and Wilson admits this in his clear-headed response to the Problem, below.

In the aforementioned essay from 1960, Wilson gives his answer to his own Ezra Pound Problem, and I don’t quite understand why he didn’t reiterate it after that; I think it’s his best thinking on the Problem:

The simple fact is that most of us dare not look at the paradox of Ezra Pound too closely, because it is the paradox of human nature - our own nature. To see Pound as he is - a man of genius and goodwill, of love and integrity and hatred and dishonesty - is to admit such contradictions can exist in the human personality. That is not a comfortable thought - it is especially uncomfortable to those of us who are, like Pound, idealists intent on changing the world - so we prefer to brush it aside and go on playing our life-myth that the universe is one big Western Movie where the “good guys” (us) are fighting the “bad guys” (our enemies).¹⁷

Let us take this as the definitive answer Wilson gave on the Ezra Pound Problem, or his own version of it, which he asks us to consider for ourselves, what with having a human nature and all. But it’s more complex than that. Near the end of his life, Wilson taught courses on Pound and related topics in his online MaybeLogic Academy. In one class’s notes he downplays Pound’s actions (this is over 40 years after the above quote, from 1960) as comparable to Jane Fonda visiting North Vietnam. Here I am, having obtained class notes as sent to me by Academy students like Mike Gathers and Eric Wagner - Wilson scholars, both - and telling the rest of the world what might have been privileged, intimate communication between Teacher and small band of Students. Wilson defended Pound’s broadcasts as “free speech radio.” Without appropriate context - such as the 1960 piece quoted in two places above - this seem dubious, notwithstanding Canto 74 and recently arrested Pound’s line “free speech without free radio speech is as zero.”¹⁸ Another student and wonderful Wilson reader ad comic book artist extraordinaire, Bob Campbell, had not known much about Pound when he took a MaybeLogic class, and apparently he was told by RAW that Pound wasn’t an antisemite. Eric Wagner pointed to examples that challenged RAW on this. Our emotional commitments to our aesthetic loves can muddle things quite a bit, eh?

[Re: The statement “Ezra Pound was an antisemite,” contains the copula form of “be”: was. In the structure of Indo-European language these “being” words seem to hypnotize us in very subtle but strong ways. It’s as if that’s what we should remember Pound for: his identity as an antisemite. Further, this verb seems to have the potential to work neurosemantically as “Ezra Pound was an antisemite every second of his life.” Does it not? He wasn’t an antisemite every waking minute. He wrote and uttered antisemitic things from roughly 1930-1962 or so. His life was 1885-1972.]

With this in mind: can we internalize this truth about the human condition? Or are we addicted to being in the “Western Movie”? As I read Substack Notes, almost everyone agrees with me about the state of the world. The algorithm feeds me what it thinks I want to read. But it’s all so overwhelmingly Western Movie stuff. I have a tough time handling it.

In the era of #MeToo and its larger extensions in the world in the mid-2020s, how do we deal with the Ezra Pound Problem in General?

A short bit:

1. What’s the nature of the egregious behavior and to what degree is it a slam-dunk, what degrees of alleged? A fine, recent book on this, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer will of course have problems at points. She loves Woody Allen as I do. But she too-easily lumps him in with Bill Cosby. Allen’s alleged crimes were investigated: twice. And they found nothing. While Cosby?…

2. Historicity of bad action: time and place. Sorry, but as morally perfect as you think you are, in 200 years someone can look at what you took for granted to be okay and be appalled. I assert we must nuance this. Yes, Washington and Jefferson had slaves, and this is completely horrid. Nevertheless, I do think we ought to activate our baseline conservative impulses and look at their work in context. What did they do that was of value to us? This is a huge topic. Of course!

3. Not sure how pertinent this one is, but it keeps recurring for me: the counterfactual: how many bad actions have not yet been caught or will never be caught? From statistics, I come up with the answer: a shit-ton. How does this alter the landscape?

4. Ought we hold artists and writers to the same standard as those with power in management positions? In my personal metaphysics, what Trump is and has done is worse than all bad actions taken by all artists, for all-time. This, too, is a big, hairy, difficult question, though.

5. Again: Why do we excuse some artists and thinkers but not others? This is the heart of the Ezra Pound Problem in general, as I posit it.

I’ll be tackling other poets and writers and the Ezra Pound Problem from that angle in the future. Thanks for reading!

1. There was a time in the late 1970s when playing Nugent’s solos and fills from “Stranglehold” was the thing to do, and I did. It’s a mini-textbook of hot playing from that era. Blackmore’s virtuosity from that same period is off the charts, though.

2. A search engine and “Eric Clapton racist” will tell you a lot in a minute if you didn’t know. Why this is so unpleasant for me to learn was: Clapton took the black blues guys and played their vocabulary very loudly, with a rock sound, an incredibly beautiful vibrato, and his bending technique is nothing short of immaculate. Sure, he had a rough childhood, but: he studied Robert Johnson, “King of the Mississippi Delta Blues” like he was a monk and it was scripture; Johnson’s 1936 recordings directly lead to Clapton’s 1968 stuff in Cream that just kills me to this day; Edward Van Halen copied every Clapton solo note-for-note from the Bluesbreakers through Cream, and derived most of his note selection from him. The entire history of rock guitar was given in that short chain of three guys. When I listen to Johnson, it’s like the source code for the history of rock guitar; when guys like Blackmore came along and incorporated classical music influences, rock guitar broadened harmonically and melodically, but Blackmore and a few others who used Bach arpeggio sequences, diminished 7th chords, and the modes of harmonic minor, still played a lot of blues, too. I have decided I still love Clapton’s work (up to around 1974, then I don’t think he gets any better in his playing: just an opinion!); I don’t care all that much about Nugent’s music these days. I love Blackmore’s playing, and he got better and better on into the 1980s, when his band, Rainbow, went through a number of singers and his music became exquisitely “pop.” I don’t care all that much about Mustaine, but I have great admiration for what he did: he was an alcoholic asshole while in Metallica, so they kicked him out and recruited a shredder, Kirk Hammett. Mustaine moves back to Hollywood and forms his own “thrash” metal band, and hires virtuoso lead guitarists, one after the other. Megadeth has a large following. He overcame being kicked out of about-to-explode Metallica. He’s not bad on guitar himself, but just the asinine things said about Obama really irked me. It was embarrassing.

3. Political Essays, Kostelanetz, pp.188-194.

4. What We Believe But Can’t Prove, ed. John Brockman, p.231.

5. Folly of Fools, Trivers, pp.19-20.

6. See this blog post.

7. “Ezra Pound and His Admirers,” collected in A Non-Euclidean Perspective: Robert Anton Wilson’s Political Commentaries 1960-2005, pp. 43-44. In his blog post cited above, Tom Jackson quotes from elsewhere in this same book.

8. Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination 1558 to Present, edited by Bob Black and Adam Parfrey, 1989, published jointly by Amok Press and Loompanics

9. I read, long ago, a prominent psychiatrist’s book on Pound’s madness, The Roots of Treason, by E. Fuller Torrey. He thought Pound was faking it to avoid hanging, basically. Torrey wrote a lot about schizophrenia, and Wilson had quoted him in those contexts, never mentioning Torrey’s stance on EzP. Sometime after reading Torrey I began reading on toxoplasmosis gondii, a sort of parasite that people can get if they’re around house cats. Toxo takes up residence in the human brain and causes a panoply of odd behavior. I thought about Pound, pre-arrest, being that nutty guy in his neighborhood of Rapallo, going around and feeding all the stray cats for fear they didn’t have enough. But I don’t find a brain parasite adequate to explain…”all that.”

10. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Doob, p.427 Another Pound scholar, Daniel Swift, points out that a lot of people think there are nasty hateful statements in Cantos and Ez’s mainstream - easily available- essays, and then they’ve heard about the radio broadcasts. All of this is true, but Swift says that while “insane” at St. Elizabeth’s he was allowed many racist, fascist visitors, and probably Pound’s worst “friendship” there was with John Kasper, and that Ez wrote at least 200 vile, fascist, racist articles, pseudonymously, predominantly from 1955-1957. He was released in 1958, the New York Times sent a cameraman to the scene, and Pound gave the fascist salute…in 1958! He went back to Italy. then gradually realized what he’d done. See The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound, by Daniel Swift, pp.198-204.

11. ibid, p.117 I feel compelled to add that I vehemently disagree, on every level…which is part of the Ezra Pound Problem: you feel compelled to address the beauty and humor and genius of his non-hateful writing juxtaposed with merde like this. It’s as if you must build up a good faith with each and every interlocutor so that when talking of Pound, you don’t need to keep going back to this Problem, and just talk about the poetry or essays. And you must easily give way to the informed reader - who might be Jewish, does it matter? - that they will have absolutely no to-do with this supposed “greatness” of this vile antisemite. EX: “The Forgetting,” in Robert Pinsky’s Gulf Music, p.15: he will not forgive Pound. Nor do I feel I have any place in saying he should. Even more disdainful of Pound: Jack Hirshman’s “Ezra Dog,” which I found in Jack Foley’s Visions and Affiliations, vol 2, pp.192-193.

12. A stunning anecdote is found in The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, by Ed Sanders, p.127, when Ginsberg is talking to the head of CIA counterintelligence and longtime friend and admirer of Pound, James Jesus Angleton, who tells AG that he himself was responsible for putting Pound in a tiger cage in Pisa to “protect” him.

13. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders, p.250

14. To the extent this represents a larger-scale adherence to the values of New Criticism, fire away in the comments.

15. Evergreen Review Reader, 1967-1973, pp. 148-150, and Michael Reck’s piece “A Conversation Between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg.” As Ginsberg related the benefits of cannabis and psychedelics, Ez actually uttered a few words aloud, something along the lines of “You seem to know a lot about the subject.” In Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. 3 by David Moody, pp.316-317: Pound saw cannabis, benzedrine, and heroin all as a Jewish-commie plot. Incidentally, many poets and writers and other artists visited Pound in Italy at this time, including Hagbard Celine: see Illuminatus!, p.776.

16. There is an anecdote I heard that RAW’s friend and benefactor Kurt Smith, who was told by RAW’s wife, Arlen Riley Wilson, that she was a “Pound widow.” That’s how much time RAW spent alone, reading Pound, at periods during their marriage. Regarding RAW’s take on Poul Anderson: RAW had a strong emotional commitment against Vietnam and authoritarian police brutality, and it overwhelmed his commitment to Anderson’s work as a science fiction virtuoso. RAW had, by 1968, been reading Pound closely for 20 years. Anderson’s mistakes didn’t stand a chance with him. Are we all like this?

17. A Non-Euclidean Perspective, p. 47. I find this explanation far more satisfying than the estimable literary critic/essayist Lewis Hyde’s take, who, in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, writes with exquisite understanding of Pound, but thinks EzP projected his own Hermes onto Jews. Similarly, poet Norman Weinstein argued that Mars and Dionysius inhabited EzP: interesting but not as compelling as RAW’s “we’re all like this” take. The “Western Movie.” Weinstein: What Thou Lovest Well Remains: 100 Years of Ezra Pound, ed. Richard Ardinger, pp. 79-83.

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18. A few lines before that: “Fear god and the stupidity of the populace.”