Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Depression

Pound and Dorothy arrived in Naples on the SS Cristoforo Colombo on 9 July 1958, where Pound was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press.[408] When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum."[409] They were accompanied by a young teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, ostensibly acting as his secretary.[410] Disembarking at Genoa, the group arrived three days later at Schloss Brunnenburg, near Merano in South Tyrol, to live with his daughter Maria,[411] where Pound met his grandchildren for the first time.[412][ah] Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Spann was seen off, sent back to the United States in October 1959.[414]

By December 1959 Pound was mired in depression.[415] According to the writer Michael Reck, who visited him several times at St. Elizabeths,[416] Pound was a changed man; he said little and called his work "worthless".[417] In a 1960 interview in Rome with Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life".[418]

Those close to him thought he had dementia, and in mid-1960 he spent time in a clinic when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary tract infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga Rudge, first in Rapallo then in Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar.[419] In 1961 Pound attended a meeting in Rome in honor of Oswald Mosley, who was visiting Italy.[420][ai] His health continued to decline, and his friends were dying: Wyndham Lewis in 1957, Ernest Hemingway in 1961 (Hemingway shot himself), E. E. Cummings in 1962, William Carlos Williams in 1963, and T. S. Eliot in 1965.[423] In 1963 he told an interviewer, Grazia Livi: "I spoil everything I touch. ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning."[423] He attended Eliot's funeral in London and visited W. B. Yeats' widow in Dublin (Yeats died in 1939).

In 1966 he was admitted to the Genoa School of Medicine's psychiatric hospital for an evaluation after prostate surgery. His notes said he had psychomotor retardation, insomnia, depression, and he believed he had been "contaminated by microbes".[424] According to a psychiatrist who treated him, Pound had previously been treated with electroconvulsive therapy. This time he was given imipramine and responded well. The doctors diagnosed bipolar disorder.[370] Two years later he attended the opening of an exhibition in New York featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land.[425] He went on to Hamilton College and received a standing ovation.[426]

Meeting Ginsberg, Reck, and Russell

Pound's biographer, Michael Reck, claimed to have had an encounter with Pound at the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice in 1967,[416] during which Pound told Allen Ginsberg and Peter Russell that his own poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through". Reck wrote about the meeting in Evergreen Review the following year. "At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron," Pound reportedly said. He "looked very morose" and barely spoke: "There is nothing harder than conversing with Pound nowadays," Reck wrote.[427]

Pound had offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck. When Ginsberg reassured Pound that he had "shown us the way", he is said to have replied: "Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things." Reck continued: "Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.'"[428][aj]

Matthias Koehl, an American neo-Nazi who claimed to have met with Pound during the latter's incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, cast doubt on these claims, writing in 1990 that:

The Ezra Pound I knew was cheerfully unrepentant, firm in his beliefs, and staunchly true to those principles he had upheld throughout his life. Never once did he give so much as the slightest hint that he had any regret about anything he had ever done or spoken during the '30s and '40s — not excluding his celebrated views on the Jewish Question. In fact, his pointed references to any number of nefarious Jewish practices left no doubt as to where he stood on that particular issue ... Unable to deny the manifest greatness of a literary giant but concerned lest Pound's 'other ideas' gain acceptance, [Ginsberg] employs one of the oldest tricks in the book: he tries to have the master himself recant. But the master — 'il miglior fabbro' — has spoken otherwise![431]

Death

Shortly before his death in 1972, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences committee, which included his publisher James Laughlin, proposed that Pound be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal. After a storm of protest, the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9.[432] In the foreword of a Faber & Faber volume of his prose, he wrote in July: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE."[433]

On his 87th birthday, on 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the San Giovanni e Paolo Civil Hospital in Venice, where he died in his sleep on 1 November of "sudden blockage of the intestine".[434] Alerted by telegram, Dorothy Pound, who was living in a care home near Cambridge, England, requested a Protestant funeral in Venice. Telegrams were sent via American embassies in Rome and London, and the consulate in Milan, but Rudge would not change the plans she had already made for the morning of 3 November. Omar Pound flew to Venice as soon as he could, with Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber, but he arrived too late.[435] Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed Pound's body to Venice's municipal cemetery, the San Michele cemetery, where, after a Protestant service, he was buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery, near Diaghilev and Stravinsky who rest at the adjoining Orthodox section, with other non-Catholic Christians.[436] According to Hugh Kenner, Pound had wanted to be buried in Idaho with his bust by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on his grave.[437] Dorothy Pound died in England the following year, aged 87. Olga Rudge died in 1996, aged 100, and was buried next to Pound.[425]