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stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved …” The poet longs for a language in which the word is the object, in which speech is as powerful and numinous as a voice in a dream. “A perfect writer,” says Whitman, “would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” The poet of Imagism longs to have symbolic value equal imaginative value. That would be justice. Only then would there be no risk of crime. And how are we to establish this equivalence? Either change the nature of money itself (stamp scrip) or else enforce a “just” currency. Enforce it—with state power.

“STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note is the best means of establishing a JUST and HONEST currency.” We now have come to the political version of willpower. There’s no need to belabor the point; this should be familiar territory. “The economic conditions of society depend on the will of its rulers,” says Pound, and the “just price”—which attaches value to commodities in a “real” correspondence—is the expression of goodwill in commerce. If we can’t change the nature of money, we will have to police it. Rather than risk letting the crooks (the Hermes-crooks) sneak in, Pound hopes to enforce a just equivalence between symbolic and embodied value through a vigilant goodwill.* And so he called his political economy a “volitionist economics,” and so he was attracted to Fascism. Mussolini offered “a will system”; as the name of the nineteenth century was Usura, so “the name of the Fascist era is Voluntas.”

V • Bathed in Alkali

One way to tell Pound’s story is as a history of the world, saying that his mind wakes at the time of Homer and moves forward, through Aristotle, through Saint Ambrose, through the Middle Ages and the song of Provence, on into the Renaissance— where it stops. Or rather, sensing something in the Reformation antithetical to the creative spirit, it stops its organic maturation and leaps four hundred years to graft a medieval economics onto the modern state.

Pound’s assumptions are tribal and ancient, connecting art, erotic life, natural fertility, and abundance. “The opposing systems of European morality go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops (the scarcity economists of pre-history).” Accepting Aristotle’s distinction between “natural” wealth-getting (farming and so forth) and “unnatural” foreign trade, Pound proceeds to imagine “a natural economic order” (as Gesell called it) in which credit is founded on the pastures, and money imitates the clover. The imagination would be at ease with such an order, for it senses that it is somehow kin to the plants and the animals, and that its products will increase abundantly if only they may be given away, like grain, like clover, like love.

From such tribal (or classic, or agrarian) assumptions, Pound moves easily into the Middle Ages. He is completely at home with canon law, which sought to codify the structure of a Brotherhood of Man: “My efforts during the last ten years …,” he wrote in 1944, “have been toward establishing a correlation between Fascist economics and the economics of canon law (i.e. Catholic & medieval economics) …”

But this modernist did not live in the Middle Ages and his economy cannot stop there. In the development of his thought he now must face the same problems that Luther and Calvin faced: how to reconcile the emerging forms of exchange (commodities, cash, the “little usury” of interest) with a spiritual commonwealth. Pound refuses the solution offered by the Reformation, a separation of spiritual and secular life through a new “double law.” It didn’t work, he declares— “Thereafter design went to hell … Azure hath a canker by usura”; spiritual and aesthetic life were destroyed by unbridled market exchange and logic let in to feed in the house of faith.

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