In 1908 London was the international arbiter of European culture and the young poet set out to lead and modernize the literary scene. By 1920, however, he had become angrily disillusioned (as had London with him) and moved to a more liberal and permissive Paris. However exhilarating he may have found expatriate circles, he remained separate from, rather than integrated into, that community, and finally withdrew from the polis altogether. In 1924 he took refuge in semi-rural Rapallo with growing interest in the programmatic controversies of early fascism, which at that point manifested itself as syndicalist – a class struggle: anti-state, anti-clerical, anti-militarist. More weight was originally accorded to occupational, rather than political, agendas – economic rather than ideological grounds.

Aspiration to a just society is not, in and of itself, reprehensible, although the manner of achieving it may become so. The initial movement in Italy after the Great War ultimately slithered into something rather ugly. Pound, like Mussolini, was both a reactionary and a revolutionary – each resisting modernization and acting as an agent of it. The poet was particularly preoccupied with inequalities in monetary distribution, as C.H. Douglas had been with purchasing power. Both advocated corrections to capitalism, not its overthrow. The enemy was identified as the arms industry and the prevailing banking system.

By 1945 Pound was forced to face the disaster of a defective, ‘Neo-Roman’ world order. The civilized, Western world which he had long celebrated, lay shattered. The role of outcast – it seemed – was forced upon him, and he was imprisoned by the Government of the United States, first at Pisa – then Washington – where he made gestures which, after the indictment for treason and the débâcle of the first Bollinger Prize, re-enforced the literary public’s image of him as a “mad racist” and “fascist” (lower case). In the later poems he naturally makes much of Fortuna and Quan Yin, Goddess of Mercy.

Once freed (1958), he gradually withdrew into silence, but not before turning against social order in so far as it is represented by patriarchal and authoritarian values which manipulate or oppress individuals – the source (root) of ethical relationships founded in family, military, and civil hierarchies (pen-yeh). The solid, social virtue of Confucius was now over-shadowed by the goddess of untamed nature, Artemis, and the Na-Khi subversion of marital values as well as John Humphrey Noyes’ utopian social experiment; the Oneida commune. Pound had always been uneasy with such man-made conventions which he came to see as being untrue to nature and inimical to live poetry.

His poetics had always embraced radical juxtapositions and ranged widely in subject matter, but in the mid-nineteen thirties there was a progressive turning away from linear, logical discourse and traditional exposition. Reading through his extensive correspondence highlights a noticeable shift in sensibility during those years. Whereas watersheds are geographically fixed, mindscapes alter imperceptibly over time. Increasingly rapid mind skips (abrupt and larger leaps from thought to thought) become more and more noticeable as well as the invention of an inverted persona; populist rather than intellectual, linguistically whimsical rather than traditionally ‘correct’. In the end that shift in mindscape settled into a fixed mindset. The Fifth Decad (1937) is, arguably, the last volume of cantos to share poetic method, linear logicality, and carefully wrought structures with its predecessors.

Pound had begun his epic without knowing where it might take him, but believing in an ideal, civic order that needed only to be discovered and defined for the modern age. He trusted that a functional design would emerge. In the months between Spring 1922 and high-Summer 1923 it did. The ‘Hell cantos’ (XIV-XV)  had been blocked out: then the ‘Malatestas’(VIII-XI) followed by the ‘Honest Sailor’(XII) and ‘Kung Fu Tsu’ (XIII). Obviously, the ‘Hell Cantos’ constituted a natural climax and logically followed the juxtaposition of Renaissance Virtù as contrasted with the decadence of modern capitalism, Confucian harmonies with the contrasting debasement of values ascribed to contemporary London. Awareness of the poem’s present strengths and direction, prompted him to reassess the imprecision of the earlier opening. A radical revision ensued. Pound wrote to his wife [23 July 1923]:

Re/ cantos [Ur I-III] I shan’t, have started if it hadn’t been for the edtn, de Looks [Three Mountains Press, 1925]; probably no harm, I have now a sense of form that I hadn’t in 1914, (very annoying in some ways). […] anyhow, anything I leave out can be restored later from earlier edtns, if needed. With sense of form, very difficult to get it all in, hodge podge, etc. | 8 |

Two days later [25 July 1923] he wrote:
 

Have started some sort of revision; cuts down the opening to two cantos instead of three, beginning with Odysseus descent into Nekuia [the under world], and doing the Browning item after that, with Bacchus ship as second canto). & then the miscellany. & then 4. 5 etc. Also various repetitions, even in later cantos, can go. Mostly it's too cluttered. | 9 |

8 | Lilly Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Pound, III

9 | Lilly Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Pound, III.

10 | Pound/Joyce ,The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York, New Directions, 1969), p. 285