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Pound seems to have felt deeply the limits of the erotic, but I’m not so sure he felt the limits of willpower. Long portions of the Cantos—particularly those written in the decade 1935–45—are rhetorical in Yeats’s sense. The voice is full of opinion without erotic heat, like an old pensioner chewing his disappointed politics in a barbershop. The history cantos, in particular—all the material about China and the long portrait of John Adams—are deadly dull, never informed with the fire, complexity, or surprise that are the mark of living images. They are 2 percent poetry and 98 percent complaint, obsession, and cant theory, what Whitman called “talk.” Working out of “good will” alone, the poem becomes mired in time, argument, and explanation, forgetting the atemporal mystery it set out to protect.

I don’t receive a shilling a month, wrote Mr. Adams to

Abigail

in seventeen

74 June 7th. approve of committee from the several

colonies

Bowdoin, Cushing, Sam Adams, John A. and Paine

(Robert)

‘mope, I muse, I ruminate’ le personnel manque we have not men for the times Cut the overhead my dear wife and keep yr / eye on the

dairy

non importation, non eating, non export, all bugwash

but until they have proved it

in experiment no use in telling em.

Local legislation / that is basic /

we wd. consent in matters of empire trade, It is by no means essential to trade with foreign nations at all

as sez Chas Francis, China and Japan have proved

it …

Etcetera, etcetera. The talk goes on for two hundred pages before we come to real poetry again in the “Pisan Cantos.”

And where were the “Pisan Cantos” written? Pound stayed in Italy during the Second World War, making radio broadcasts denouncing the Allies; when the war was over, the U.S. Army captured him and locked him up in an army jail near Pisa. They treated him horribly: they kept him outdoors in a wire-mesh cage with the lights on; they allowed no one to speak with him. He had a breakdown. In short, they broke his will. He was forced to walk backward, out of pride into sympathy. “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. / Pull down thy vanity …” He was shoved toward an inner life again, out of his mechanical opinions, and the poems return to poetry for a while.

II • Durable Treasure

Pound once wrote to Louis Zukofsky: “My poetry and my econ are NOT separate or opposed. Essential unity.” To illustrate the connection and by so doing to move into the economics, I want to retell some old anecdotes about Pound and his fellow modernists. No one seems to deny that Ezra Pound could be arrogant and autocratic at times, but we have several remarkable testimonies to a gentler side of his personality as well. All of them bespeak a connection between art and generosity.

T. S. Eliot took a boat to London shortly before the First World War. He was working on a doctoral thesis. He had written some poems, most of which had been lying in a drawer for several years. Pound read them. “It is such a comfort,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe, “to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.” He sent “Prufrock” to Poetry magazine and midwifed it into print, refusing to let Monroe change it, refusing even to give her Eliot’s address so she might, as he put it, “insult” him through the mails with suggested alterations.

In 1921 Eliot left the manuscript of The Waste Land with Pound, and Pound went through it with his red pencil. He thought it was a masterpiece. And why should its author not go on writing such masterpieces? Well, he was working as a clerk in Lloyd’s Bank in London and didn’t have the time. Pound decided to free him. He organized a subscription plan called “Bel Esprit.” The idea was to find thirty people who could chip in fifty dollars each to help support Eliot. Pound chipped in, as did Hemingway, Richard Aldington, and others. Pound threw himself into it, hammering the typewriter, printing up a circular, sending out a stream