1The English language has retained the French word renaissance, but the Italian name for this period of great artistic and scientific change – which started a little earlier there than elsewhere – is rinascimento. This term should ostensibly be translated as “rebirth”, but, like Walter Pater in his 1873 book of essays on the subject, most people translate it as “revival” – the implication being, of course, that it is “a revival of classical antiquity” (Pater 1873, xxviii). Ezra Pound himself speaks in Gaudier-Brzeska of a “revival of classicism” (Pound 1916, 134) – which he cannot help but frame with quotation marks, feeling, perhaps, that this phrase was already a cliché – and a little further down he also speaks of a series of “awakenings” (ibid., 136) which took place in Italy about that time. By using this other word, he introduces a nuance which is not found in the term “revival”: the works of the Renaissance are not mere imitations of the classics but instead display a new kind of consciousness, more patent and potent than it had been in centuries. However, it is clear from that text that Pound, like the others, is looking back at classical Antiquity and considers these awakenings to be a coming-back to clarity after the obfuscation of the Middle Ages. Indeed, one of the stranger aspects of the term “renaissance” (or rinascimento) is that its prefix, rather than indicating the leap forward which we associate with this historical period, actually invites us to look back to a time of former splendour. This is a recurrent problem in Italian historiography: the other period of great national change, the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, is generally called the Risorgimento: the question lies, of course, in knowing what precisely is supposed to rise again (which is the literal meaning of risorgere) since Italy was never a united nation in the first place. Yet, it is with these elements of European history in mind that the American poet Ezra Pound ponders the possibility that the twentieth century, with its myriad technological changes and flurry of avant-garde movements, may itself be a new Renaissance. This “Italian frame of reference,” which Reed Way Dasenbrock identifies in the poet even in his London period (Dasenbrock 1991, 144), will frame Pound’s thinking about that possibility throughout his entire career. I wish here to chart the evolution of his engagement with Italian notions of renaissance for, when looking at the texts in which he evokes the idea of a renaissance or the historical period of the Renaissance, we see the traces of a series of semantic shifts that go from the Rinascimento to risorgimento as reawakening, to the Fascist rivoluzione and finally, in the Pisan Cantos, to resurgence – the real meaning of risorgimento.
- 1 See for example Peter Makin’s Provence and Pound (Makin 1978), Capelli 2003, Capelli 2018, Casillo (...)
- 2 See for example Wilhelm 1974, West 2005, Manzari 2020, and Bacigalupo 1980.
- 3 See for example the critique of industrialized landscapes in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or in the sho (...)
- 4 “In this year the Venetians refused to make war upon the Milanese because they held that any war be (...)
- 5 Michael North is of course using Pound’s own concept, which he had developed in his 1911 essay “I G (...)
- 6 Unless otherwise indicated, the translations provided in this article are mine.
2While quite a bit of ink has flowed on the subject of Ezra Pound and the medieval troubadours1 or the poets of the dolce stil nuovo,2 not much has been said of his approach to the historical Renaissance and the few critics who did write specifically about this aspect noted that it was “a source for modern experimentation” (Paul 2016, 51) and “[h]is own most constant model of change” (North 2013). This relative scarcity of research on Pound and the Renaissance period (which is generally understood as covering the whole of the sixteenth century) in Poundian criticism is in part due to the fact that the poet does not, at first glimpse, seem to have been very interested in that period at all: indeed, in his 1914 essay entitled “The Renaissance,” Pound devotes a mere five paragraphs to the actual historical movement; the rest of the essay deals mostly with the possibility of an American renaissance in the twentieth century and even in those pages he told his readers that the historical Renaissance’s main benefit had been the emergence of a number of “vortices” in Italy, a clear allusion to the Vorticist movement of which he was a member at the time (Pound 1968, 220). Nonetheless, having been a student of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Hamilton College, the American poet was obviously very aware of the important turn in European history that was the Renaissance. However, his view of that historical period remained ambivalent. Unlike John Ruskin, he did not consider Renaissance art a symptom of the moral degradation of European societies (Ruskin 1911, 37). Pound did share the view that art can be “symptomatic” (Pound 1973, 25) of certain social conditions and he would later claim that tolerance of usury (which he saw as a spreading social disease) could be visible in paintings (Pound 1966, 27), but he thought that the real decline of European societies was much closer to his own time. In situating this decline in the nineteenth century (Pound 1966, 26), in correspondence with the age of industrialisation, he was being typically Modernist.3 Pound alluded more often to Walter Pater than to Ruskin, even in later years, which seems to indicate that Pater’s more positive view of the Renaissance stayed with him longer and was perhaps more akin to his own. From Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (originally published in German in 1860) he quoted a relatively unexceptional sentence4 which to him must have seemed a “luminous detail” (North 1992, 134)5 showing that the decline of a medieval conception of war and of the State makes room for a saner approach (Pound 1973, 22) – this again demonstrates a rather positive view of the Renaissance. When Pound does underline some elements of social decline that could be traced back to the Renaissance, such as the decline of the Catholic Church (Pound 1966, 27), he is actually adopting a wider point of view on European history and, unlike Ruskin, he does not identify the revival of classical and pagan cultural elements as a threat to the Christian faith – although it must be said that, like the fascists’, Pound’s interest in the Catholic Church is more political and cultural than religious (Ferkiss 1955, 179). It appears that this ambivalence existed in Italian historiography as well and the Enciclopedia Treccani summarises it as “l’antinomia fra splendore culturale e decadenza morale del Rinascimento” (online; “the antinomy between the cultural splendour and the moral decadence of the Renaissance”6). The idea that it had been a period of moral decadence does not seem to have resonated with Pound as much as with other critics, but neither did he consider its culture more resplendent than that of previous times.
3Outside of the visual arts, Pound’s interest in the Renaissance lay mainly in the “Latin” poets to whom he devoted the last essay of The Spirit of Romance (originally published in 1910). In the introductory paragraph he suggested that the “classical revival” of the Renaissance had the benefit of “br[eaking] down the restricting formulae of mediaeval art” and of “br[inging] back to poetry a certain kind of nature-feeling which had been long absent” (Pound 2005b, 223). This statement is however qualified in a parenthesis written in 1929, in which he wonders whether there was any benefit at all. Further down in the essay Pound summarises the two “gifts” brought to “the art of poetry” by the Renaissance, and more specifically the classical revival, as “the nature feeling and the widening of the scope of the subject matter,” but he hastily adds that “these are, of course, resurrections, not initial contributions” (Pound 2005b, 238). With the word “resurrection” making an appearance here, one is reminded of the Italian word “risorgimento” and of the fact that, according to the Enciclopedia Treccani, it was often used in the eighteenth century as a term for the historical Renaissance. Rather than seeing the Renaissance as a turning point in Italian and European cultural history, Ezra Pound seems to think of it as a period of retrieval. His 1929 conclusion to the essay is indeed unequivocal:
[T]hese men can presumably teach us nothing about writing that we couldn’t learn better from Homer or Catullus, but they can teach us why Homer and Catullus are today where we can find them […] why we are in a mental state to receive the text. (Pound 2005b, 240)
4In other words, we have these authors to thank for our present knowledge of classical literature rather than for their own literature.
5In his ABC of Reading (originally published in 1934, over twenty years later), Pound does have one thing to reproach Renaissance and post-Renaissance artists with: unlike older writers who “are all conscious of having something to tell the reader” and “the painters of the Quattrocento” who are “intent on their MAIN subject,” later writers and painters are not so “intent on what they are saying” but “gradually more and more concerned with the way they are saying it” (Pound 1961, 131-132). The decadence comes later in the literary world than in the visual arts, however, since Pound considers Arthur Golding’s sixteenth-century English version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be part of the former tradition. This criticism, like others of Pound’s concerning the Renaissance and the following period in literary history, is oddly reminiscent of a passage from Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, the first prominent effort, in the nineteenth century, to give the Italian people a history of their own national literature.
- 7 While Redfern’s translation is generally faithful, there is one notable deviation in the mention of (...)
This weakness and servility of character, accompanied by a complete indifference in every matter connected with religion, morality, and politics, which had already begun in the time of Petrarch, increase so greatly as to become the rule in society, and are shown with a frankness that today seems almost like cynicism. Now and then we get a certain hypocrisy, when some new opinion not universally accepted is being discussed, but when ordinary life is in question we get it quite naked. It is a literature without veils, and is even more shameless in Latin than in the vulgar tongue.
The content of a work had ceased to be important. What mattered was not the thing to be expressed but the manner of expressing it. The greater number of the writers were secretaries to princes, and were ready to use their Latin for embroidering the conceptions of other people. The lovely unity of life as Dante had conceived it was broken – the loving concord of intellect and act. A literato was not required to have opinions, and still less to make them agree with life. He looked on thoughts in general as gifts, come to him from the outside; his business was merely to clothe them. His brain was a rich emporium of phrases, maxims, and elegancies, and his ears were full of cadences and harmonies: empty forms, divorced from all content. So the literato and the literary form were established in Italy. (De Sanctis, 1931, 372-373)7
6The idea of moral decadence is obvious from the first paragraph. The literary consequence of this social phenomenon, De Sanctis tells us, is that same transformation which Pound identified in the above-mentioned passage from ABC of Reading: content loses its value, especially its ethical value (the opinions with which the literato’s life should agree, the principles it should follow) and only manner matters now. De Sanctis’s judgement echoes a common opinion about seventeenth-century Italian baroque poetry (Mancini 2008, xv) and the allusion to princes’ secretaries also evokes Machiavelli, but for the Italian critic this problem dates back to the Renaissance poets who wrote in Latin (“una letteratura […] più sfacciata in latino che in volgare”) and even further back to Boccaccio (“fiachezza […] di cui vediamo gli albori fin da’ tempi del Boccaccio”) and Petrarch: later, he lumps together the great baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, Torquato Tasso, and Petrarch as poets “in whom manner prevails” (“ne’ quali prevale la maniera”) (De Sanctis 2017, 602). This “shameless” or rather barefaced (“sfacciata”) literature appears to be antithetically naked (“ti è innanzi nella sua nudità”) and dressed with rhetorical ornamentation (the phrase “dargli la veste” is followed by the enumeration of the rhetorical gifts of the literato). It is contrasted with the poetry of Dante, which evinced “[t]he lovely unity of life,” “the loving concord of intellect and act,” or what Ezra Pound identified as the Tuscan “cult of the harmonies of the mind” in The Spirit of Romance (Pound 2005 2, 223) and which he opposed to the Renaissance’s “cult of culture.” It is evident that neither of these two authors could ever think of the Middle Ages as a dark age for the arts, and especially for the art of poetry. In fact, Pound, in another passage from The ABC of Reading, celebrates “the ‘transparency’ of medieval authors” and deprecates the way “the reading world was once again drunk on antiquity, Greece and Rome” (Pound 1961, 71-72). It is not that the American poet dislikes the classics for, as we have seen, he was thankful to Renaissance authors for having retrieved them, but the metaphor of drunkenness seems to indicate his distaste for the excesses to which those authors’ enthusiasm ran.
7It appears then that Pound’s opinion of the Renaissance was not unequivocally positive. To this poet who was always eager to deal in Weltliteratur rather than focus on the Anglo-American tradition (Moody 2009, 22-23), the Renaissance did indeed seem a period of great ebullience in Western Europe and therefore an inspiration for his own artistic endeavours and those of his friends (Pound 1916, 138-139). Yet, because he wished never to be a mere imitator, he often took pains to tell his readership what aspects of the Renaissance should not influence a twentieth-century artist – most notably its propensity for rhetoric (Pound 1916, 136). He summed up his rather balanced view in “Affirmations (Analysis of this Decade),” first published in New Age in February 1915: “Whatever one’s party, the Renaissance is perhaps the only period in history that can be of much use to one for the adducing of pious examples, and for showing “‘horrible results.’” (Pound 1916, 133). The key to making use of the Renaissance in the modern age is to know how to study that historical period: “[…] there seems to be something in the study of the quattrocento which communicates vigour to the student of it, especially to such scholars as have considered the whole age, the composite life of the age, in contradistinction to those who have sentimentalized over its aesthetics.” (Pound 1916, 133). Ezra Pound, like Jacob Burckhardt, favoured a holistic approach: to study the Renaissance was to study its spirit as much as its art.
- 8 This is also the view that is given now in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
8This wider scope was a recurrent feature of Pound’s thinking about the Renaissance: it was wider in thematic but also in chronological terms. Having studied Italian cultural history, he knew that the Italian Renaissance spanned much longer than the High Renaissance8 (which lasted from about 1490 to the sack of Rome in 1527), the period to which we most often refer when speaking about this historical movement. Not only is the Italian Renaissance often said to have lasted into the late sixteenth century, it is also thought to have started as early as the late thirteenth century (Wyatt 2014, xxi-xxvii). When Pound referred to the Renaissance in his writings, as is visible from the comments reported above, it was often the latter period, the cinquecento (the 1500s), which he had in mind, but his enthusiastic engagement with Italian history and literature reflects the wider span of the movement. In “The Renaissance” Pound tells us for example that “the rinascimento began when Valla wrote in the preface of the Elegantiae: “[…] ubicumque Romana lingua dominatur”” (everywhere the Roman language dominates) (Pound 1968, 220). Lorenzo Valla was an Italian scholar who lived during the quattrocento. In one of the articles from his series entitled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (published in 1911-1912 in New Age) the American poet claimed that the songs of the twelfth-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel contained “some germ of the Renaissance, of the spirit which was to overthrow superstition and dogma, of the ‘scientific spirit’ if you will, for science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism” (Pound 1973, 28). The link Ezra Pound makes between a twelfth-century poet and an early-sixteenth-century artistic movement may be surprising, but, as Maria Rosa Menocal suggests, Pound, like Dante before him, is engaged in a rifacimento of Arnaut Daniel (Menocal 1991, 91), refashioning him as a conspicuously modern poet – once again, in the process in rifacimento, it is retrospection, a looking-back (ri-), that leads to making something new (-facimento). Arnaut Daniel becomes the epitome of the poet who leads the world into modernity and, if it is true that a poet-critic is often speaking about himself and his own work when commenting on that of others (Menocal 1991, 114-115), then Pound is also refashioning himself as a Renaissance poet for the twentieth century. The Renaissance, viewed in a very positive light here, is presented almost as a state of mind rather than a historical period, and opposed to two other states of mind: the dogmatic and the romantic or sentimental. In this view, the Renaissance, as a literary movement, stretches back into the Middle Ages, even before the time of Dante. And indeed, one of Pound’s most important sources on the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, begins with a summary of the thirteenth century, gives ample room to a study of the Italian City-States in the fourteenth century and devotes at least as many paragraphs to Dante as to the later literary figure of Machiavelli, who is more commonly associated with the Renaissance.
- 9 As Lawrence Rainey tells us, the writing of the Malatesta Cantos was “a catalytic moment” in the fo (...)
9The political history of Italy in the Renaissance, with which Burckhardt deals at length, also bore a strong influence on the early Cantos. The most prominent historical figure from the quattrocento in this part of the poem is of course Sigismondo Malatesta, about whom Pound’s opinion, as Michael North reminds us (North 1992, 134), greatly differed from Burckhardt’s. While the historian presented this condottiere as a decadent and even a criminal (Burckhardt 1910, 278), Pound only retained his more positive qualities (Burckhardt 1910, 136) and made him into an important patron of the arts9, almost a model for modern sponsors, as in Canto VIII:
I want to arrange with him to give him so much per year
And to assure him that he will get the sum agreed on
You may say that I will deposit security
For him wherever he likes
And let me have a clear answer,
For I mean to give him good treatment
So that he may come to have the rest
Of his life in my lands –
Unless you put him off it –
And for this I mean to make due provision,
So that he can work as he likes,
Or waste his time as he likes
(affatigandose per suo piacere o no
non gli manchera la provixione mai)
never lacking provision
sigismundus pandolphus de malatestis
In campo Illus Domini Venetorum die 7
aprilis 1449 contra Cremonam (Pound 1996 [1923], 29)
10In this letter, which Pound adapted, like others of Malatesta, for his poem (Perloff 1975, 107-109), Sigismondo Malatesta’s benevolent intentions towards the maestro di pentore (master of painting) are made clear, explicit (as in the sixth line) and even redundantly so through a variation on a theme, the series of allusions to the money which Malatesta wants to give the artist. The phrase “wherever he likes” or “as he likes,” working as a repetend, reinforces the image of the benevolence of the condottiere as he allows the artist the freedom necessary to the full release of his creative powers. The parenthesis which contains an extract from the original Italian and the paratextual information at the bottom give a sense of authenticity to the quotation, reinforcing the reader’s impression that they are being presented with Sigismondo’s true character. In “Murder by Capital” (published in The Criterion, 1933) Pound compared Mussolini favourably with Sigismondo Malatesta, arguing that the Duce was the first modern head of state since Malatesta “to proclaim quality as a dimension in national production.” (Pound 1973, 230) In Sigismondo’s time this quality was ensured by his paying a retainer to his artists, as the above quotation shows. Pound’s chosen Renaissance heroes are perplexing, to say the least, and the various periods of cultural awakening he thought he saw throughout history are not always ones that historians would agree with: another curious example of greatness outlined by Pound in the Cantos is that of Pietro Leopoldo when he was duke of Tuscany in the eighteenth century, for instance in Canto XLIV (Pound 1996 [1937], 223). Pound hails him as a reformer and omits the authoritarian aspects of his rule over the Austro-Hungarian empire (Wandruszka 1968, 13-14).
11However, the most important awakening in recent history according to Pound was occurring then. In “Affirmations (Analysis of this Decade),” after going into the detail of what made the Renaissance a singular period, Pound jumps back to the present and attempts to explain why the Modernist movement is closer to being a new Renaissance than other artistic innovations, both the more classical and the more “florid” (or baroque?), which preceded it (Pound 1916, 137). Pound, like the Futurists, emphasises the role of technology in this break from the spirit of the Renaissance which, according to him, had prevailed until the late nineteenth century: “This enjoyment of machinery is just as natural and just as significant a phase of this age as was the Renaissance “enjoyment of nature for its own sake,” and not merely as an illustration of dogmatic ideas” (Pound 1916, 140). Machinery has changed man’s relationship to the world: he cannot think of the world in the same way as his ancestors and must find new ways of expressing this relationship, to convey this transformation of the Anschauung. In the same manner, Renaissance artists and scholars could not retain the same perspective on the world as their forefathers once they had rediscovered the classics and grown conscious of the ancient (Western and Mediterranean) European culture which united them across national divides.
- 10 This quest for intensity in art would become more and more abstract until it became the aestheticis (...)
12 Pound’s conclusion at the end of the essay is that, where the Renaissance was seeking “for a lost reality, a lost freedom,” the Vorticists are “seek[ing] for a lost reality and a lost intensity” (Pound 1916, 141). Realism, according to Pound was far removed from rhetoric which he assimilated with “dressing up” instead of “present[ing] the ‘Image’” (Pound 1916, 95). His opposition of Dante against Milton in that essay on Vorticism must be understood in the following manner: Dante was closer to Pound’s sense of the Renaissance because he dealt in images and Milton, though he came after the Renaissance, was less modern because he lost himself in rhetoric. What unites the two movements – the Renaissance and Vorticism – is a form of realism, the definition of which here is peculiar to Pound; what signals a break between the two is the transition from the quest for freedom to that for intensity.10 This difference is significant, given Pound’s later anti-liberal and even anti-democratic stance. As Rebecca Beasley reminds us, his perspective on the historical Renaissance was not nostalgic: even as he was looking back on it, he, always the avant-gardist, was still looking ahead (Beasley 2010, 202-204), and that ability to combine, almost to fuse, past and future was a trait he shared with the fascists (Gentile 1994, 74). We are told that “[i]t may be an hallucination, but one seems able to find modern civilization in its simple elements in the Renaissance” (Pound 1916, 133-134). According to that stance, the Renaissance was a starting point and an inspiration for almost any truly modern movement.
- 11 “Tuttavia il termine che ha maggior fortuna è Risorgimento, e di Risorgimento parlano in genere i d (...)
- 12 This is reaffirmed in a 1934 allusion to the link that unites the ‘poeti dei primi secoli’ and the (...)
13About the years 1911-1912, Pound was often thinking – and writing – about another word for the Renaissance: the Italian risorgimento, a long-time synonym of rinascimento, as the Enciclopedia Treccani informs us.11 The American poet’s interest in this term seems sudden, enthusiastic but also apparently short-lived. Circa 1911, he wrote in the unpublished poem “Redondillas”: “I sing of risorgimenti, / of old things found that were hidden” (Pound 2003, 179). This interpretation of the word risorgimento aligns with what Pound tells us about the Renaissance in “Affirmations (Analysis of this Decade)”: artists in such a period seek a lost reality, but a reality that was not so much dead as dormant. Within such a conception of the Renaissance, it is possible to envisage that what lay sleeping sometimes awoke prematurely, as in the “germ of the Renaissance” which Pound thought he had found in the poetry of Arnaut Daniel.12
- 13 See for example his allusions to Lorenzo Valla’s exactness and to Machiavelli’s clarity in Gaudier- (...)
14Pound, who was always intent on using “le mot juste”,13 reflected on the term he ought to use towards the beginning of the second part of Patria Mia, a series of articles written about 1912 and published in book form in 1913:
When I say that I believe in the immanence [sic] of an American Renaissance, “Renaissance” is not le mot juste, but it has come by usage to mean almost any sort of awakening. “Risvegliamento” would be the better term if one must stick to Italian. (Pound 1973, 128)
15In the first part, he had written:
I have declared my belief in the imminence of an American Risorgimento. I have no desire to flatter the country by pretending that we are at present enduring anything except the Dark Ages.
A Risorgimento means an intellectual awakening. (ibid., 111)
- 14 In the 1909 essay he wrote about Whitman, Pound was ambivalent towards his predecessor and compatri (...)
16The judgement Pound passes on his homeland is voluntarily harsh, probably because he hoped in that way to provoke the “intellectual awakening” he so desired. Pound’s ideas about the American literature of the nineteenth century would later be contradicted by the coining of the phrase “American Renaissance” by the critic F. O. Mathiessen who believed that it could be applied to the period in which authors such as Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman were writing (Matthiessen 1941, ix). In 1913, however, no one was speaking of an American Renaissance, and Ezra Pound believed it was yet to come, as his assessment of Walt Whitman’s poetry proves,14 and in many ways his own literary endeavours were meant to contribute to it. What is striking about these remarks is that Pound’s hubristic attitude towards the craft of literature is shored up by his search for semantic exactness: the word “Renaissance” is discarded for another Italian word – for when Pound speaks of “stick[ing] to Italian” he is thinking less of the term “Renaissance,” as the quotation might seem to indicate, than of its synonyms, rinascimento and the term which he has actually been using so far, risorgimento. The preferred word, “Risvegliamento,” is the literal translation of the definition Pound gives for risorgimento: awakening. However, Pound’s chosen term in English for risvegliamento and risorgimento omits the prefix “ri-” or “re-” and thus effaces the action of looking back on a former era. Yet, the comparison between the America of the present day and “the Dark Ages” clearly underlines the parallel with the Renaissance rather than the nineteenth-century Risorgimento. The shift is not historical, from one period to another, but semantic: Pound wants to avoid speaking of revivals (or rebirths) and instead focus on the idea of a cultural awakening. In the years that followed, during and right after the First World War, Pound’s disillusionment grew to the point that he could neither hope for nor speak any more of an American Renaissance. In the early 1920s he finally turned his gaze back to the country which had first inspired this reflection on his native land.
17In August 1923 Pound wrote in a letter to Nancy Cox-McCormack that “Italy has an opportunity now, an opportunity she would not have had thirty years ago, or even ten years ago” (Rainey 1997, 99). The reason was that, after the First World War, Germany was “busted” and France “too tired,” and with regard to more long-lasting qualities England was “too stupid” and America “too far from civilization” (Rainey 1997, 99). The importance of seizing such opportunities would be underlined again by Pound in 1933 in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (Pound 1935, 15). Here again, as elsewhere, Pound used Sigismondo Malatesta’s court at Rimini as an exemplum for launching a cultural awakening, an example which he believed the Duce should follow (Estrade 2017). The previous year Pound had expressed a similar idea in one of his Paris letters in the Dial and Peter Nicholls comments that “[t]hat was in the period immediately prior to the March on Rome, but the “reawakening” Pound had in mind was a cultural rather than a political one” (Nicholls 1984, 47). However, Lawrence Rainey’s analysis unmistakeably shows that culture and politics were in this instance inextricably linked as Pound’s involvement in Italian politics rested on cultural proposals and Pound’s archival research in Rimini was facilitated by fascist operative modes which he enthusiastically praised (Rainey 1997, 104). Ten years later Pound would write in Jefferson and / or Mussolini that “[t]he Italian awakening began showing itself in two ways” (Pound 1935, 84). These two ways were literary: “The bookshop windows began to change” (Pound 1935, 84) and artistic: “The restauri” (i.e. the restorations of historical monuments, Pound 1935, 85). While Pound’s perspective is ostensibly cultural at first, it soon shifts to the political: “Where other regimes would have haggled and niggled the fascist regime has just gone ahead, without any fireworks whatever” (Pound 1935, 85). The implication is clear: the fascist government, with its authoritarian methods, is responsible for this “Italian awakening”.
- 15 This expression is commonly used in Italian literary history to refer to Dante, Petrarch, and Bocac (...)
18“Plenty of chance for a NEW Quattrocento.” wrote Ezra Pound in Guide to Kulchur in 1938 (Pound 1966, 344). Through this sentence he was both evoking what to him was the highest period of the historical Renaissance – the fifteenth century – and suggesting that fascist Italy was the place for this new period of intellectual ebullience. In 1940, in an article for the Meridiano di Roma entitled “I classici dell’avvenire” (the classics of the future), he expressed his thoughts on this topic more precisely: he distinguished between the classicism of the cinquecento and the better (“molto meglio”) but lesser-known (“meno noto”) classicism of the quattrocento (Pound 2005 1, 337) and proposed a programme of classics for the fascist era. In that programme, he grouped the Latin authors chosen by the scholars of the sixteenth century with some ancient Greek poetry, foremost of which were Homer’s epics, the Chinese wisdom of Confucius and Mencius and Pound’s personal tre corone15 (three crowns) of medieval literature: Dante, Cavalcanti, and Villon. In spite of Pound’s known idiosyncrasies, it must be noted that his personal canon is not very far from common taste, as shown by the enduring popularity of Dante’s Divina Commedia especially. What is more surprising is the fact that this programme was specially tailored for the fascist era when these classics were also praised by intellectuals in democratic countries. We must remember here that Pound enjoyed historical parallels immensely, especially when the comparison was between fascist Italy and other great periods of world history. In a 1937 article for The Criterion entitled “D’Artagnan Twenty Years After” Pound spoke of the general public’s occultation of “any man who approaches the Renaissance totalitarianism” (Pound 1991, vol. VII, 227). He was referring, of course, not to political totalitarianism as we now understand it thanks to Hannah Arendt’s definition of the concept (Arendt 1979, 325), but rather to a holistic approach to literature and the arts, which he thought prevailed at that time and no more in his. This particular use of the word “totalitarianism” was common among Italian fascists, who are thought to have coined the word (Matard-Bonucci 2018, 6). The political implications cannot be ignored, however: the word, even in this apparently innocuous sense, was mainly used by fascists and their supporters, and the borders between the cultural and the political spheres were porous enough that being culturally totalitarian essentially entailed the acceptance of at least one of the premises of political totalitarianism. As was so often the case for Pound, politics and the arts were inextricably linked.
- 16 His article entitled “The Renaissance”, where he quotes Valla’s urging people to speak Latin, dates (...)
19Similarly, Pound’s insistence on the importance of latinity, while a lifelong concern for the poet,16 was heightened during the strongest period of his involvement in fascism. In the above-mentioned article he compares detachment from latinity with patricide: “Chi vuol staccarsi dalla latinità è capace di uccidere il padre, il nonno e il bisnonno” (“One who wants to detach oneself from latinity is capable of killing one’s father, one’s grandfather, and one’s great-grandfather,” Pound 2005 1, 336). Such strong feelings are hyperbolic, to be sure, but they reflect a common interest shared by Pound, Renaissance scholars, and the fascist government in what was dubbed in Italian “la romanità” (Romanness). Emilio Gentile tells us that a comparison between the Italian fascists and their Renaissance forefathers is at least partly warranted by that common interest:
Like Italians of the Renaissance, the fascists viewed Rome as a source of inspiration for civic virtues, a sense of the State, a sacralization of politics, and universal organizing values – all elements for elaborating a modern model of a new civilization. In this sense the cult of Romanness was reconciled, without notable contradiction, with other elements of fascism that were more strictly futurist, such as its activism, its cult of youth and sport, the heroic ideal of adventure, and above all the will to experience the new continually in action projected toward the future, without reactionary nostalgia for an ideal of past perfection to be restored. (Gentile 1994, 74)
20This way of looking to Romanness for inspiration reconciles the fascist tendency to look back to the past with their determination to mould the future. It is not about restoration or revival, and similar values are evinced in Pound’s “Affirmations (Analysis of this Decade).” The poet praises Lorenzo Valla’s appreciation for “the Roman vortex” (a phrase which combines the Roman past with the Vorticist future) and speaks of a new obfuscation starting in the mid-Renaissance: “And, curiously enough, in the mid-Renaissance, rhetoric and floridity were drawn out of the very Greek and Latin revival that had freed the world from medievalism and Aquinas” (Pound 1916, 136). Distaste for “rhetoric” was a trait that Pound shared with Mussolini (Spackman 1996, 115) long before he adhered to the fascist movement and the obfuscation of Roman clarity he thought he saw in that period and the centuries that followed also became part of the fascist discourse. According to Pound, “the Romanesque architecture, being the natural evolution from the classic, seems more admirable than the artificially classic modes of the Renaissance” (Pound 2005 2, 22). The simple, clear lines of the church of San Zeno are the visual counterpart of good rhetoric, as opposed to the “artificial” “floridity” of later churches. The architectural comparison continues with Pound’s praise of Mussolini’s titanic works in the streets of Rome:
E LO SQUALLORE MEDIOEVALE che sparisce! Adopero la parola spazzatura precisamente. La spazzatura di quindici secoli trascurava la storia romana, andate a vedere i sonetti di Joachim du Bellay, adattati dai latinisti del Rinascimento, tradotti in inglese da Spenser, ecc. Dall’aprile scorso quando sono stato a Roma, a dicembre, Mussolini ha fatto più per sbarazzare questa gloria, che tutti i Papi dal secolo VII al secolo XIX.
Aiutato dalla meccanica moderna?
Questo aiuto conta per il 5% nella faccenda. Quello che ha sbarazzato la Via dell’Impero è la VOLONTÀ.
IT IS THE MEDIEVAL SQUALOR that is disappearing! I use the word rubbish with precision. The rubbish of fifteen centuries obscured Roman history, go see the sonnets of Joachim du Bellay, adapted from the Latinists of the Renaissance, translated into English by Spenser, etc. From last April when I went to Rome, until December, Mussolini did more to clear that glory, than all of the Popes from the seventh to the nineteenth century.
Helped by modern machinery?
That help accounts for 5% of the job. What has cleared the Via dell’Impero is the WILL. (Pound 2005a, 257-258)
21The poet, writing in the Italian newspaper Il Mare in January 1933, and having described his visit to the “Esposizione del decennio,” the very successful Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution which was held from 1932 to 1934 (Paul 2005, 69), praises what he – following fascist propaganda – interprets as a return to classical Roman aesthetics. As Pound saw it, another form of obfuscation had taken place after the Middle Ages; the classics had been rediscovered, but that had not been accompanied by the resurrection of Roman glory. What was needed to remedy that was the continuous revolution that the Italian fascists proposed. Michael North reminds us that the apparent paradox of this fascist “rivoluzione continua” “is in fact the remains of the earliest meaning of revolution preserved within a modern travesty of it” (North 2013): the continuous turning of a wheel, which invariably leads us back to a previous point before returning to a future point.
- 17 See for example the famous Canto XLV or the end of the radio speech entitled “Brain Trust” from 24 (...)
22Although his statement should not be taken at face-value since Pound was writing in a state-controlled Italian newspaper during the fascist era and was motivated in part by a desire to flatter Mussolini (Zapponi 1976, 47), the text does more than simply echo the fascist State’s propaganda. The adjective “medioevale” soon detaches itself from its literal meaning to encompass the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fascist revolution (“dal secolo VII al secolo XIX”). Despite the allusion to the late Renaissance French poet Joachim du Bellay pointing to “the rubbish of fifteen centuries” as a medieval element, Pound seems to suggest that later centuries continued the process of filling the streets of Rome with architectural rubbish. Michael North makes a more sinister analysis of the image of rubbish needing to be cleared away, telling us that it “was not excess verbiage but a whole people” (North 2013, online). Although Pound seems to be focusing on architecture, his own overt political beliefs allow for this interpretation of his words. Indeed, the rhetoric that was the undoing of the Renaissance may just as well be the lies of the usurers whom Pound was constantly berating in his Cantos as well as in his prose and radio broadcasts.17 When speaking of the rubbish, Pound proceeds poetically, by way of alliteration (of the impure <s>), from squallore to a noun with a similar connotation of filthiness, spazzatura, and thence to Mussolini’s action against it, the verb sbarazzare. Though this stylistic process shows just how much room Pound’s reasoning makes for ideology, the general feeling is consistent with Pound’s other statements about the Renaissance: like Pater, he considers that there was more promise than realisation in the movement: “The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved” (Pater 1873, 26), and it is this sense of promise which continuously inspires him.
23In fact, Pound was so satisfied with the fascist regime’s work that he wished, once again, for an American awakening which would now be spurred by fascist values. In an article entitled “Antifascisti” he wrote:
Da Leopardi all’Era Fascista c’è voluto un secolo. Non vedo ancora l’alba nuova nella Nuova Inghilterra. Ma nell’anno XVIII dell’Era Nostra io non accompagno Henry Adams a Chartres per cercarla.
From Leopardi to the Fascist Era it took a century. I do not yet see the new dawn in New England. But in the year XVIII of Our Era I will not accompany Henry Adams to Chartres to look for it. (Pound 1992, vol. VIII, 30)
24And in another, entitled “Ancora Jefferson” (Jefferson Again), he asserted: “E’ l’ora del risveglio per gli S.U.A. o la sua rinascita sarà ancora più lontana” (“It is high time for the U.S.A. to wake up or its rebirth will be still further away”, Pound 1992, vol. VIII, 122). The contents of these extracts obviously draw on fascist ideology, both in the use of the fascist calendar or in the call for a reactionary movement in the USA, but the imagery is even more interesting with regard to the question that concerns us: Pound seems to be awaiting a new dawn (“alba nuova”), a rebirth (“rinascita”), or an awakening (“risveglio”), all words that are synonymous with renaissance. Let us not be mistaken about Pound’s intentions: although he seemingly washed his hands of America (“Io non accompagno Henry Adams”), he did think that rebirth came through revolution, which entails a violence that he always failed to mention. Additionally, the poet saw a parallel between the Italian (fascist) and the American (republican) revolutions. He first outlined this parallel in his essay Jefferson and/or Mussolini, written in 1933, where we are told that “Jefferson participated in one revolution” (Pound 1935, 14) and “the continuing revolution” (the fascist “rivoluzione continua,” Pound 1935, 127) “is almost a refrain out of Jefferson” (Pound 1935, 28). In Carta da visita, written about ten years later directly in Italian, Pound drew this parallel even more clearly for his readers: “La vostra rivoluzione è la nostra, la nostra (fu) ed è la vostra, contro un comune putrido nemico.” (Pound 2012, 49) (“Your revolution is our revolution; and ours was, and is, yours: against a common, putrescent enemy,” Pound 1973, 309). That “common, putrescent enemy” was, of course, according to Pound’s belief system, usury and its henchmen, the usurers or financiers (Pound 2012, 54). A political revolution does not necessarily require an “intellectual awakening” but to totalitarians such as Pound and even to non-totalitarian Italian speakers – to whom, as shown above, risorgimento could mean both the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Renaissance and the nineteenth-century national revolution – politics and the arts are intermingled. The fascist revolution could only lead to a cultural renaissance in Italy – and perhaps elsewhere in the world too.
25By the summer of 1945, Pound’s belief in the fascist revolution should have been quite dampened, if not completely extinguished. The Republic of Salò had been well and truly defeated and Pound himself was being detained at the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa (Stock 1982, 408-409). The opening lines of the first Pisan Canto bear the mark of this ideological loss:
The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by the heels at Milano
That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock
DIGONOS, Δίγονος, but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it? (Pound 1996 [1948], 445)
26This political tragedy, like Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, is a gory one: former leaders are “tanned and stuffed” or hanged “by the heels” like animals. It could be argued against Pound’s melancholy outrage that this violence is just recompense for the fascists’ own actions. While the word “dream” makes fascism sound like an innocuous utopia rather than the destructive totalitarian regime it was, the allusion to the Persian sage Manes (or Mani) begins a comparison with Mussolini which is biographical, since they died in relatively similar ways (Terrell 1993, 362), political (they led ideological revolutions, promoted a utopian vision) and religious: they, like Christ, have been sacrificed to please an ignorant mob, martyred because their spiritual enterprise was misunderstood. This parallel is of course reinforced by the word “crucified” at the end of the sixth line. Pound’s decision to use Mani’s Latin name may also be motivated by paronomasia: Manes sounds like the Latin noun manes meaning “dead souls” (Gaffiot 1967, 945). The appearance of religious overtones may seem surprising, given the well-known fact that Pound was not a religious man (Stock 1982, 8), but, whatever Pound’s personal reasons for choosing to use this particular type of rhetoric here, the liturgical dimension of this Canto is undeniable. Two pages further on we find the following extract:
“Cosa deve continuare?”
“Se casco” said Bianca Capello
“non casco in ginnocchion”
and with one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands
Lute of Gassir Hooo Fasa (Pound 1996 [1948], 447)
27After a sixteenth-century Italian anecdote which may have been inspired by the death of Mussolini’s mistress (“la Clara” or Clara Petacci), Pound evokes the legend of Gassire, king of the Fasa tribe (Terrell 1993, 366). The words “Hooo Fasa” (Hail Fasa) work as a refrain throughout the Canto:
4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa
Gassir, Hooo Fasa dell’Italia tradita
now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hooo Fasa,
With the four giants at the four corners
and four gates mid-wall Hooo Fasa
and a terrace the colour of stars (Pound 1996 [1948], 450)
28Pound builds a parallel between the legend of the “city” (or in reality empire) of Wagadu and fascist Italy: reconstruction is possible as long as the (Roman?) city/empire is not destroyed in mind as well. It is a matter of faith, for Italy, like Christ by Judas, has been “betrayed” (“tradita”). The final line from this extract echoes one found not long after the above-quoted opening lines: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” The allusion to “the colour of stars” suggests a paradisal atmosphere which pervades the Canto. Pound finally speaks his fascist creed a little further on:
“I believe in the resurrection of Italy quia impossibile est
4 times to the song of Gassir
now in the mind indestructible (Pound 1996 [1948], 462)
29Pound believes in “the resurrection of Italy”, that is, its future rebirth, or renaissance, its resurgence or risorgimento. Once again, Italy will rise and the splendour of former ages – ancient Rome, the quattrocento, the Fascist completion of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento – will be restored. The pronouncement of this creed is accompanied by an allusion to the legend of Gassire which reads like sheet music for a hymn and an echo of the previous passage (“now in the mind indestructible”) whose repetition feels incantatory, as if the poet, aware of his delusion, were trying to convince himself that his faith is right. The use of Latin, the sacred language of Catholic Italy on whose importance Pound had often insisted, is contradictory: while it should normally be used to affirm and reinforce one’s faith, here it denies the veracity of the previous statement, of Pound’s very creed. Yet, since “quia impossibile est” means “because it is impossible,” the poet is in fact reasserting his faith in a convoluted manner: he believes against all odds and he believes all the more as the possibility of reconstruction is denied. The use of religious rhetoric in political discourse is nothing new (Gentile 2002, 23-24), but Pound resorted to it much more after the fall of the fascist regime than ever before. The hope for a resurgence of political greatness in Italy, a risorgimento, had by then become elegiac.
30In those days Pound, ever a pagan, was also thinking of another birth, that of the goddess of love, whom he called alternatively Venus (or the Italian Venere), Aphrodite, and Cythera. Italian drafts from before his internment at the D.T.C., circa 1944, show that he was thinking poetically of the return of the Roman gods (“Ma gli DEI ROMANI son tornati;” Pound 2002, 172), a resurgence which took a more definite form in the first Pisan Canto where we find Pound drawing some of his imagery from the Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. The first occurrence is found towards the middle of Canto LXXIV:
but this air brought her ashore a la marina
with the great shell borne on the seawaves
nautilis biancastra
By no means an orderly Dantescan rising
but as the winds veer
tira libeccio (Pound 1996 [1948], 463)
- 18 Botticelli’s painting also appears in the first of the “Three Cantos”: “It Botticelli / Brings her (...)
31It is easy to recognise Botticelli’s Venus in the female form that is “with the great shell born on the seawaves.” Pound had invoked the imagery of The Birth of Venus (La Nascita di Venere) as early as Canto XVII with the phrase “she like a great shell curved” (Terrell 1993, 73)18 and this early Canto is often seen as offering a paradisal vision (Makin 1985, 152-155), but the poet had then left out such imagery in the following “decads” of Cantos. In this passage from Canto LXXIV, the divine apparition is soon compared to Pound’s most important source for the writing of Paradise: Dante’s Divina Commedia. The comparison is somewhat unfavourable to Botticelli, but it draws attention to the paradisal quality of the passage as well as to the idea of a “rising,” the idea that, in Pound’s mind at least, something, some vision is being born “amid ruin” through “la fede,” Pound’s faith in a fascist utopia (Canto LXXVIII, Pound 1996 [1948], 498).
Beauty is difficult the plain ground
precedes the colours
and this grass or whatever here under the tentflaps
is, indubitably, bambooiform
representative brush strokes wd/ be similar
cheek bone, by verbal manifestation,
her eyes as in “La Nascita”
whereas the child’s face
is at Capoquadri in the fresco square over the doorway
centre background
the form beached under Helios
funge la purezza,
and that certain images be formed in the mind
to remain there
formato locho
Arachne mi porta fortuna
to remain there, resurgent EIKONEΣ (Pound 1996 [1948], 466)
- 19 Pound also mentioned “Botticellian sprays” (Pound 2003, 559) in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” which was (...)
32In this extract from Canto LXXIV Pound mentions the title of Botticelli’s painting explicitly and compares it with an unnamed woman, possibly a model for another painting (“brush strokes” are mentioned earlier) or a lover (Terrell 1993, 385) – either way a fitting stand-in for Aphrodite. The birth in this particular passage is also an artistic one, the creation of an image – verbal or visual – after long and arduous hours of labour. The repetend “Beauty is difficult” found throughout the preceding pages accompanies this act of birthing and suggests at the same time rebirth, or at least a summoning of ghosts in the mind, the revival “by verbal manifestation” of the era of Edwardian aestheticism with the invocation of Pound’s old acquaintances: Aubrey Beardsley, William and T.E. Lawrence, various Oxfordian figures, Ernest Rhys… This association in Pound’s mind is not strange given how important acts of remembrance are in the Pisan Cantos, but it is also true that Pound’s interest in Botticelli may have either begun or been reinforced during his first decade in England, since British interest in the quattrocento painter was then at an all-time high (Levey 1960, 291).19
33Pound, like many of his contemporaries, had also read Pater’s The Renaissance and was aware of his “highly personal interpretation” (Levey 1960, 302) of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. While his poetry bears no explicit trace of the “conflict” and “lassitude in the goddess of pleasure” identified by the Victorian critic, the fact that he was reminded of this painting in a time of loss, when he was mourning the political vision he had adhered to for the past twenty years, strangely echoes the “cadaverous” (Pater 1873, 47) tones that Pater found in that picture. The “mere sunless dawn” (Pater 1873, 48) is no doubt an appropriate image for “a man on whom the sun has gone down” (Canto LXXIV, Pound 1996 [1948], 450-451) and while Pound probably did not share the belief that there is a contradictory “sadness” intrinsic to “the depositary of a great power over the lives of men” that is Venus (Pater 1873, 49), the fact that he thought specifically of Botticelli’s picture in that time of travail is indicative not only of Pound’s faith in a future rebirth, but also of the bleakness of the prospect in the present.
- 20 See Plato’s Symposium.
34That rebirth could only, at present, take place in the mind is underlined by Pound in this very extract (“and that certain images be formed in the mind”), but the strength of this resurgence is very real, as emphasised by the repetition of “to remain there.” Finally, the phrase “resurgent EIKONEΣ” stresses once again the vigour of Pound’s paradisal vision – and by extension of the fascist dream – through a translingual echo of “risorgimento” in “resurgent” and the use of the Greek for “icon” – a sacred image. The reader is essentially being told that ideals which are true and beautiful, according to the ancient Platonic conjunction of the two concepts,20 will always resurface even when they are temporarily made to disappear. Like the King Arthur of Welsh legends (Thomas 2001, 8-11), they are only lying dormant underground and will rise again when the times are opportune to them.
35Pound thought various movements in the subsequent centuries had been “revivals” of the intellectual revival that was the Renaissance (Pound 1916, 137). In his essay “Cavalcanti” he even applied the term “renaissance-ism” to post-Renaissance Mediterranean literature, this derogatory prefix of “-ism” denoting poor imitation (Pound 1968, 192). His appreciation of the Renaissance seems to have been mostly positive, although he much preferred the earlier moments of the period and considered that, in Italy at least, there had been a decadence of the classical revival starting in the sixteenth century. It had descended, he thought, into mere rhetoric, of which, being an Imagist devoted to the “[d]irect treatment of the “thing”” (Flint 1913, 199), he could only disapprove. He believed that what the Modernists, and others of his contemporaries, were doing was different, was closer to being, like the original Renaissance, a paradigm shift or “a change in human awareness” (Pound 2005 2, 239). The appeal of the concepts of rinascimento and risorgimento for the poet resided precisely in the consequentiality he attributed to them as paradigm shifts. He thought that, if a new Renaissance could be initiated, a renewed western culture could come into being and shape the course of humanity, just as the previous Renaissance had done. All that would remain to do thereafter would be to prevent the decline of this renewed culture so that, unlike the culture born of the original Renaissance – or so it seemed to Pound – this one could endure. When looked upon closely, however, Pound’s writings offer an ever-elusive Modernist Renaissance: the Vorticist impulsion peters out; for the most part, American literature only finds favour with Pound when written by expatriates; the Fascist revolution never truly yields the cultural awakening Pound was pushing for and “the dream” (Pound 1996 [1948], 445) dies out before it can be achieved. Of a “NEW Quattrocento” there can only be “plenty of chance” (Pound 1966, 344), but never a full realisation, and it seems that Pound’s vision was itself but another form of “renaissance-ism.” Even his acute linguistic perceptions were unable to offer him much more than a variation on a theme: a rinascimento is a risorgimento which is itself a risveglio or risvegliamento and can take the form of a rivoluzione… The fascist mind is continuously looking backwards while thinking of going forward and hears in distant echoes the call of the future. Pound’s poetry registers this conflict, at first even without his knowledge: his enthusiastic interest in the past is never fully reconciled with his innovative approach to versification; his reactionary vision is not annulled but rather amplified by his Modernist practice. Even after the fall of the Italian fascist regime – the regime which had been the carrier of his hopes for a cultural awakening – Pound is still not only faithful but full of faith that a rebirth, a rinascimento, can take place though he does not know where or when. The tone, however, has changed, for, his vision having been defeated, Pound cannot be hopeful anymore and his allusions to creative acts (city building, painting, a divine birth) are marred by the shadows of death and destruction.
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