Poundland

 

When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972.

In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale, who visited him, commented "Ezra at this point championed not the real Italy, for which he couldn’t care less, but the setting of his waking dreams."

Rapallo is beautiful. Officially a city, it is in fact a small community of not many more than 30,000, clustered around a bay at the foot of lushly wooded hills. It's the kind of place where Italians go for their holidays. There were not too many Brits around when we were there. One day, when we had intended to visit the Montallegro shrine up on the hill, it was too windy and rainy for the cable car, which was chiuso. (We were more fortunate the next day.) But that rainy day: perhaps a chance to see if there were any Pound relics to visit? Was there perhaps a small museum? No, there was not. The tourist information office had just a few words on display about him and his circle and mentioned the Giardino Ezra Pound. Google Maps told me this was a mere eight minutes' walk from our hotel. We walked in that direction. Then Google Maps told me we'd overshot it. I looked back. High on a lamp-post there was a nameplate. This was it. The patch of lawn and the pond featuring four spouting frogs, pictured at the top of this piece.

It's hard to interpret this as anything but a snub by the city authorities. And I have to say I am in sympathy. Even if Pound and his cohorts have arguably put Rapallo on the map for non-Italians, why would you want to celebrate a noted Fascist sympathiser and anti-semite who sucked up to Mussolini and made countless offensive radio broadcasts? A friend of the Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, an ultra-nationalist who designed the black shirts adopted by the Fascists? 

I am indebted to my friend the British poet Kelvin Corcoran, whom we later met in Nice on our way home, for pointing me to this succinct verdict by the estimable Basil Bunting in a letter to Pound:


Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world". I have never felt comfortable with that assessment. Why should a way with words, even a genius with words, as Pound undoubtedly demonstrated – he did more than anyone else to drag English-language poetry from its Victorian heritage into the late-Modernist era – entitle one to pontificate on politics and human relations? Why should the status of “poetry” and "the poet” act as validation for shit and ill-thought out views? This is where I take issue with Shelley. Poets are no more unacknowledged legislators of the world than plumbers are.

In fact, this gets to the heart of why I have always been uncomfortable, even at the time I was immersed in verse composition, with being designated a "poet". No, they're not all like that! Many, like Bunting, are demonstrably intelligent. But there is an awful mythology attached to that word and I can't shake it off.

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