Ezra Pound's Fascist Politics

Ezra Pound's Fascist Politics

This article relates to The Dime Museum

Joyce Hinnefeld's The Dime Museum makes many references to the poet Ezra Pound. Pound was born in Idaho in 1885, grew up near Philadelphia, and spent much of his adult life in Europe. He died in Italy, his adopted country, in 1972. As a poet, he was best known for his epic The Cantos, published in segments from 1925 onward. Taking inspiration from Homer and Dante, the work had themes ranging from early U.S. government to Chinese history. The Poetry Foundation calls Pound "one of the most influential and most difficult poets of the 20th century." His oeuvre was a watershed of the Modernism movement, and he supported the early careers of writers such as H.D., Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, and W.B. Yeats. He also edited T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land into a publishable form.

However, for many, Pound's politics are an insurmountable problem, making it impossible to "separate the art from the artist." By the time of the Second World War, he had been an expatriate in Italy for over two decades. He became an apologist for dictator Benito Mussolini's regime and was paid by the Italian government to spread pro-fascist propaganda to the USA. The playwright Arthur Miller said that "A greater calamity cannot befall the art than that Ezra Pound, the Mussolini mouthpiece, should be welcomed back as an arbiter of American letters." Some of his ideology, including his vehement antisemitism, is evident in The Cantos.

For his vocal support for Hitler and Mussolini and his criticism of President Roosevelt, Pound was charged with 19 counts of treason against the United States in 1945. Deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, he was instead sent to a psychiatric institution, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Pound continued to network with white supremacists. Through a correspondence, he befriended Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper, who is believed to have bombed multiple synagogues in the South as well as a Nashville school, to protest its desegregation.

In The Dime Museum, a protagonist in Italy encounters CasaPound ("House of Pound"), a neo-fascist movement active in Italy since 2003, showing how Pound's ideology continues to live on and impact people. In 2019, CasaPound briefly became a political party in order to compete in a European Parliament election. Far-right, white supremacist movements are currently in resurgence across Europe as well as in the USA. The use of Pound as a character is not simply a cautionary tale or throwback to historical precedent, therefore, but an urgent reminder of how widespread and insidious his opinions still are.

Image of Ezra Pound courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Dime Museum. It first ran in the September 10, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.