Richard Edwards asks Jonathan Gill:
 
>As to anti-semitism, it is a mystery to me where he got it from (Dorothy?).
>The prejudices of his Philadelphia suburb, as documented in the local press
>at the time (Carpenter again), seem to have been directed mostly against
>Italians; obviously Pound didn't pick up much of that. I wonder whether, in
>the course of your research, you formed an opinion as to whether or not the
>meanness of Pound's hatreds was in any way associated with his mental
>illness, if any. 
 
It certainly seems true that by the mid-1940s, at the latest, Pound was out
of touch with what ordinary people think of as reality. A sad instance, one
of many, is the letter written in English and Chinese to the commander of
the DTC and beginning, "In view of the situation in China and Japan, it
seems to me that the bottling of my knowledge now amounts to suppression of
military information" (Spoo and Pound letter 42, 3 Nov. 1945). It's true,
too, that the antisemitism of the letters to Olivia Agresti lacks anything
like a sense of proportion -- as when Pound attributes the catastrophe of
the war to Jewish influence over Hitler (Tryphonopoulos and Surette letter
70, 5 Nov. 1953). But I should think the general historical situation is
that prejudice and mental illness are independently distributed. Some
bigots are crazy; others aren't. If you think Pound's antisemitic texts are
evidence of insanity, how will you think about the respectably dressed
civil servants who wrote the Third Reich's statute against Jewish-owned pets?
 
The question probably can't be answered if it's posed that way. But if we
narrow it down and refer it specifically to language, as (for instance)
Robert Casillo does, we may at least be able to learn something about
Pound's language. For what it's worth, here's an example of my own, from a
chapter in progress. If it has a moral, I suppose it's only the modest
thought that we ought to read history as if it were poetry.
 
-------
 
        On July 11, 1954, 8½ years into his incarceration in St. Elizabeths
Federal Hospital for the Insane, Ezra Pound received a visit from his
Jewish imitator Louis Zukofsky. It was a family affair; Zukofsky brought
along his wife Celia and his son Paul. Paul was three months short of his
eleventh birthday but already embarked on his career as a violinist, and at
St. Elizabeths he gave a recital for Pound and some of his fellow inmates.
The next day, Pound responded with a letter. 
        That composition displays Pound as he saw himself in relation to the arts:
a stern but affectionate preceptor-at-large. The Zukofskys' performances
are accordingly subjected, one at a time, to scrutiny and analysis. About
Celia's music Pound asks, "Question of whether C/ jams one LINERARR
statement against another, or merely puts in chords?" About Louis' poetry
he opines, "damn if I see what yu wd/ lose by a rewrite making EVERY line
comprehensible." And about Paul he speaks as one artist and father to another:
 
     AND my prophetik soul / foreseeing: every time that brat gits a
thousand $ bukks fer playing Weiniawski, Zuk will be beatin' his breast and
crying: why did I beget this cocatrice.
                                Only practical suggestion is that yu begin distinguishing between
infantilism and MUSIC FER ADULTS.  (Ahearn 209-10. "Weiniawski" is
presumably Henryk Wieniawski, composer of showy virtuoso pieces for the
violin.)
 
        Pound was one of the twentieth century's great critics, and in this letter
we see him at his best: passionate, wide-ranging in his sympathies and
eagerly receptive to the new, yet possessed of a profound sense of value.
Imagine F. R. Leavis with a sense of proportion, a sense of humor, and a
prose style. But before Pound was a critic he was a poet, and he was never
satisfied with his own critical language until he had economized it. Within
two weeks of writing this letter, for instance, he had reduced its contents
to their essentials. "Mr. Zukofsky brot his ten year old son to play Mozart
on the lawn a fortnight ago," Pound wrote to his confidante Olivia Rossetti
Agresti. "ETC. INDIVIDUALS/ BUT......" (Tryphonopoulos and Surette 163). 
        In the next sentence, Pound makes his point general and explicit: "I shd/
like to arouse ORA's interest in history/ in biology/ in Luther Burbank, in
eugenics/" But that expository prose is only a redundant gloss on the
ellipsis following Pound's "INDIVIDUALS/ BUT." It is hard to make a
conjunction serve as an allusion, but that is what Pound has done here. A
more prosaic speaker of English — for instance, Faulkner's garrulous
character Jason Compson IV — would have filled in the ellipsis and finished
the sentence. "I have nothing against jews as an individual," Jason
explains when his turn comes to pick up the tale of _The Sound and the
Fury_. "It's just the race." But when Ezra Pound hit his period key six
times rather than write out such words, he was communicating a profound
intuition. That six-dot suspension of utterance tells us that some meanings
are so deeply embedded in the social structure of language that they can go
without saying. Pound's sense of Mozart on the lawn was something actually
experienced, as compared with his fantasy of the word "Jew." But the word
"Jew" was a preemptive significance. It silenced the echo of the violin.
 
Jonathan Morse
Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa