Page 20 - Demo

11. EZRA POUND
POET AND FOUNDER OF IMAGISM, ONE OF THE KEY MOVEMENT OF MODERN POETRY
From The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound in Venice
The first developer of a modern aesthetic in poetry, the American expatriate Ezra Pound, will always be associated with Venice. The American poet came to live in this city after his stint at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC – an asylum to which he was committed after being deemed unfit to attend his own trial of treason. After mourning the deaths in WWI and losing faith in England, Pound had moved to Italy, where throughout the 1930s and 1940s he espoused Benito Mussolini’s fascism and even supported the likes of Adolf Hitler. Around the same time, he began to be accused of anti-Semitism. US forces arrested him for treason and detained him in a camp in Pisa. In this six-by-six-foot steel cage, Ezra lost his mind–hence, St. Elizabeth’s.
After his release, he returned to Castle Brunnenburg for a time before retreating with his mistress to Rapallo and then Venice. On the corner of Rio S. Vio. There’s a print shop there now. This is where Ezra considered chucking his early poems into the Grand Canal. In 1958, he returned to Venice with his daughter Mary and lived on Calle Querini, a street away from Guidecca Canal. A plaque announces on the side of the narrow abode: ‘Rudge’. His grave is on the island of San Michele. Four gondoliers in black rowed his body in 1972 from the Civil Hospital of Venice to the cemetery there, where he lies next to Olga Rudge in the Protestant section beneath plain marble tombstones.
The Cantos Poem, partially composed while a prisoner of the US in Pisa, are the most critically acclaimed of Pound works. A fine edition of this lyrics is indeed dedicated to Venice. Here he poet gives a serendipiditous and vital vision of Venice, a very different one from the Decandentism in rage in those years, as well as from Rilke’s lyrics and Mann’s Death in Venice. Venice is represented through the juxtaposition of different material, historical documents most of the time. In Cantos XXIV – XXVI Pound criticized 16th century Venice as for him the Venice of Titian’s, in its very richness and commercialization was reminiscent of the modern world, where commercial values have thoroughly infiltrated the art world. And what Pound disdains about the art world wherever it is corrupted by commercial and market forces. Therefore although praising one American, Thomas Jefferson, as an enlightened and committed patron of Arts (comparing him to Sigismondo Malatesta) he addressed a fierce critic to the powerful American collectors of his time, from Frick to Mellon, who in his view had not gone to support living artists and they had not even bought good art.