The Poets of Rapallo
At the close of World War II, one of America’s greatest Modernist poets, Ezra Pound, was arrested in Italy. He had lived there many years, and during the war, broadcast Fascist propaganda to U.S. troops.
His punishment and confinement have been the subject of other books. The Poets of Rapallo focuses on Pound before the war, when he held court at the Italian coastal town with visiting British, Irish and American writers. They numbered W.B. Yeats, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky and others—all of them concerned with revitalizing language through poetry and linking poetry to life. They found inspiration in Pound’s zesty word games but also shared some of his other beliefs.
Author Lauren Arrington is a careful, nuanced scholar, weighing words carefully. She defines terms carefully: Italian Fascism was politics as an aesthetic of action; it was Futurism in power, fueled by brutal impulses. During the ‘30s Italian Fascism enjoyed widespread respectability and curiosity as an alternative to communism and capitalism at a time when democracy seemed unable to cope with economic and social crises. Arrington shows the poets in Pound’s circle didn’t necessarily agree with everything he said and wrote. Many gradually distanced themselves.
The Poets of Rapallo also shows that—contrary to Pound apologists—the poet really was a Fascist and an espouser of hateful antisemitic, racist rhetoric.
