As the list-member who claims to have interjected the Hitler/Joan of Arc
quote from Pound into the list's mail, who now wishes to comment on/to Lin
Wei
1. Pound quotes Pirandello's being anti-Freud while commenting on Cocteau,
so perhaps there is no use in applying Freud to Pound? Jung is quoted by
Pound in his introduction to a selection from the Cantos, so perhaps putting
Pound through Jung's sieve is valid?
2. You really made a mountain out of a molehill re Pound's feisty comment
"Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr." Pound's broadcasting
was driven primarily by his personal reaction to the war & his adulation of
Mussolini (having had an audience with him in 1933) and prior to that having
written some 'fan letters' to Il Duce including advice re economics etc.

The fact that Pound believed that both Axis dictators (Hit & Muss) actually
had any interest in Confucius is daftness on his part. Mussolini claimed to
have read some of the Cantos and Pound was very pleased if not overwhelmed.
However much later, in desperation Pound began broadcasting, and the tone of
the broadcasts is desperate throughout with the exception of a few for
instance the one on Joyce; if he had been tanked up on whiskey during
broadcasts he might have been less inflamatory by being less intelligible
and certainly what he hates he makes plain and clear, but anyone can see it
all comes "from the heat oppressed brain" rather than his better self.

He may have felt silenced by the war and did feel snubbed by the US
government when prior to the outbreak of war, having made an effort to speak
with President Roosevelt instead speaking with Secretary Wallace. Poets and
such writers broadcasting, has become a brief of the present List member who
is completing the biography of Francis Stuart, the Irish poet/novelist who
broadcast on Berlin radio 1940-44 along with Lord Haw Haw and others.
Stuart's first wife Iseult Gonne (daughter of Maud Gonne) was the mistress
of Pound & also Wyndham Lewis. Writers such as Pound & Stuart broadcast for
the Axis powers in an effort to seek personal martyrdom, alienation,
repudiation and ultimately the insights of the outsider which are part of
the complex personality of such persons. Hence, all of Pound's remarks on
Rome radio can be seen in the light of the rebel bawling at the world or
trying to, undignified and dangerous as it was, if not callously inciteful
to the greater evils of the war.

Then naturally Pound would blurt out such dissonances as the one about
Hitler & Joan of Arc; and stand on board the liner Cristoforo Colombo and
allow himself to be photographed giving the fascist salute having arriving
in Naples after his release from St Elizabeth's in 1958. He also told
reporters then, that "All America is an insane asylum". It is obvious that
Pound had 'mental breakdowns' if not before the war then certainly at Pisa
after his capture; this is not to denigrade his writings as those of a
madmen, far from it, he paid dearly for his writings in passing through the
veil of madness and returning, perhaps as T.S. Eliot claimed, "neither sane,
nor insane" but anyway by whose standards of normalcy. So your extended but
interesting prolixity re Pound's Hitler/Joan of Arc comment tended to the
obsessive and the redundant. Similarly with Pound and those who abhor him,
come across as phobic and tending to racism like himself; those who take his
best work from the dross he produced are the wisest, who recognise the best
Cantos from the worst and the latter far outweight the former, however Pound
tends to have his idolators who see him as a scholargod and a masterpoet
throughout like Shakespeare & Browning. Yes his best poems are great stuff
but not the secondary work which stinks of the lamp.