I add my vote to those in favor of Alastair Hamilton's _The Appeal of
Fascism_. It's an excellent book. But it was published way back in 1971,
and we need something more up to historiographic date. Ideas, anyone?
 
One possibility: the essays collected in _Fascism, Aesthetics, and
Culture_, ed. Richard J. Golsan (UP of New England, 1992). This includes a
translation of Cantos 72 and 73 as an appendix to Robert Casillo's
"Fascists of the Final Hour: Pound's Italian Cantos," and another essay
which moves this exciting proposal:
 
"What have we said when we have called a work of literature fascist? Sartre
said long ago that 'nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to
write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism,' and this belief that a
great work of art could not be written in defense of evil ideas has
controlled much of the discussion of the politics of Anglo-American
modernism. Defenders of Pound, Lewis, and others have sought to separate
the work from the politics, arguing in effect that because it was great art
it could not be in defense of evil ideas. Critics of this approach have
reversed the argument but accepted the dichotomy, arguing that it was not
great art because it was in defense of an evil idea. But only a philosopher
such as Sartre would approach literature so relentlessly in terms of its
ideas, its intellectual content. An approach to fascist literature based on
how it works rather than on what propositions it argues for seems to me to
redraw the picture slightly but significantly." (83)
 
This is from Reed Way Dasenbrock's "Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination and
the Fiction of Paranoia."
 
But as long as I'm being bibliographical:
 
A student who is now enjoying Longenbach's _Stone Cottage_ asked if she
could write a paper for me about Yeats's influence on Pound. I said yes,
but added that I'd be more interested in a paper about Pound's influence on
Yeats. I have to confess, though, that I can't myself supply a reference to
that topic. This student is just beginning graduate school, and I don't
want to send her off to Ireland or bog her down in close readings of the
Yeats variorum. So, question: is this a user-friendly topic? Are there some
references that would be helpful to a beginner? Or should we go with the
flow of influence from the older poet to the younger?
 
Jonathan Morse