Pound’s “New Found Orchid”: The Poetics of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

by Maximilian S Werner

The epitaph beginning Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (E.P. Ode pour l'Election de Son Sepulchre) signifies Pound's attempt to create a viable, new poetic. One of the questions that arises as a result of the epitaph’s placement, and that it is an epitaph, is precisely what this new poetic or sensibility involves. That the poem as a whole actively juxtaposes distinct sections or content[1] suggests that Pound intends the figure of E.P., who is "dead" at the outset, to be compared or contrasted with the figure of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, particularly as he is rendered in the sequence beginning with Mauberley and ending with poem IV. Over the course of the sequence, Mauberley becomes increasingly estranged and eventually “dies" because of his limited poetics or relationship to the world.  And yet it is a result of these same "graduations" that the figure of E.P. (who also recognizes his past limitations) is resuscitated and the past is made relevant to the modern world.

Both figures embody an aspect of Pound's self, and it is by comparing their perspectives that the gist of Pound's new poetics is realized: an interdependency between past and present is crucial for the maintenance of a vital poetry, because together the past and present offer a sense of continuity, connectedness and, therefore, a larger and deeper significance. This connectedness is achieved through a simultaneous embrace and transcendence of one's own time, and by linking the essential as it is represented by both past and present. By seeing the past or present in isolation, the poet is certain to become a "consciousness disjunct," a fate that Pound seems to tacitly acknowledge when he writes,

For three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"

In the old sense. Wrong from the start – (1-4)

And later,

Unaffected by "the march of events,"

He passed from men's memory in l'an trentuniesme

De son eage; the case presents 

No adjunct to the Muses' diadem. (17-20)

Even if E.P. is "out of key with his time, "he remains firmly rooted in the tradition by "maintaining the sublime / In the old sense." And yet there is something regrettable and limiting about being unaffected by the events of one's time. Thus E.P.'s "case presents no adjunct to the Muses' diadem" because it does not involve, to borrow a phrase from Pound's ABC of Reading, "a complete presentation of life, or of [E.P.'s] epoch" (41). To an extent, Mauberley shares E.P.'s interest in the past, for "His true Penelope/Was Flaubert" as well, but like E.P., he seems to be missing something,

Firmness,

Not the full smile,

His art, but an art

In profile; (Mauberley 9-12)

Together with the opening stanza, which has Mauberley turn away "from the 'eau-forte / Par Jacquemart’ / To the strait head / Of Messalina," the two stanzas following this one suggest that Mauberley's relationship with and reference to the past is a problem for Pound. Unlike E.P., whose aim it was to retain and renew "the classics in paraphrase," Mauberley does not seem to have the power "To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff." The coin on which the "strait head / Of Messalina" is pressed becomes a powerful trope for Pound's aversion to both sensationalism and materialism, and yet it is this toward which Mauberley turns. This may explain why Pound likens him to a

Colourless

Pier Francesca, 

Pisanello lacking the skill 

To forge Achia. (13-16)

As elsewhere, Pound here uses juxtaposition to create tension and establish meaning. The comparison implies that there is something potentially redemptive about Mauberley, because even though the very "skills" that make Francesca's and Pisanello's work remarkable are negated, they are still Francesca and Pisanello. Or are they? In any case, Mauberley's contribution is not realized in isolation, but in proportion to how it helps clarify the need of "selected perceptions" (to jump ahead to The Age Demanded), as they derive from the past and present. In spite of E.P.'s being born "out of date," he avoids this disconnect between the past and present when, in stanza three of the epitaph, he writes,

Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὂσ’ ἐνὶ Τρoίῃ

Caught in the unstopped ear; 

Giving the rocks small lee-way

The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year. (9-12)

In contrast to a "Colourless / Pier Francesca" and a "Pisanello lacking the skill / To forge Achia," the figure resuscitated here, Odysseus, retains its vitality by virtue of being linked and found relevant to the modern world. This moment in the epitaph counters "the faint susurrus / Of [Mauberley's] subjective hosannah," which Pound came to see as the "Ultimate affronts to/ Human redundancies" (The Age Demanded 49-50).  For by employing materials from various contexts, among them Greek quotations, jargon and their attendant tonalities, E.P. succeeds in objectifying the moment and thereby infuses it with a much vaster importance, an importance that includes but goes well beyond his own situation. Pound hints at this process when, in ABC of Reading, he notes that a word’s meaning “comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably” (36). He also states: “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension” (34). Although the sentence break "sing all forms and degrees of human comprehension" is fortuitous, it accurately describes what Pound is doing in the stanza above. The fact that he "sings" the epitaph (and indeed much of the entire poem) in quatrains with an ababcdcd rhyme scheme may seem antithetical to Pound’s goal of representing his time, that is, when read in terms of the final stanza of section II.  But if Pound has taught the reader anything, it is to observe how the materials are being used in relation to one another. Thus he writes,

The "age demanded"chiefly a mould in plaster, 

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster 

Or the "sculpture" of rhyme. (9-12)

Because Pound, here and throughout the epitaph, uses quatrains and the "sculpture" of rhyme, the reader may get the sense that he is still resisting the demands of his own time. It may seem, moreover, that the use of the rhyming quatrain is part of resuscitating "the dead art of poetry,” particularly when considering that the form is the most common of all European forms. But Pound has made statements elsewhere that suggest otherwise. In "A Few Dont's for an Imagist,” Pound offers guidelines for the Imagist, one of which is "to compose on the order of musical cadence and phrasing, not according to strict, unvarying rhythms." Also, late in ABC of Reading, Pounds states that "rhythm is a form cut into time" (202). 

Of course, Pound is again being ironic, for when the reader notes the variations of, in, and because of the line (changes in stressed and unstressed syllables, line lengths, sporadic caesura placement, heavy internal rhyme, assonance, consonance and consequent tonal shifts), he or she will realize that the true rhymed quatrains and the "mould in plaster" are essentially the same thing. What’s needed is not merely a "pianola," an artificial form or container that determines how a thing is expressed, but a form "vastly more compendious, [which] will naturally accommodate a vastly greater amount of real speech, than will a set of variants starting from a single type of line, whether measured by duration or by the alternating heaviness of syllables" (203). Thus, Pound uses different "types" of lines in the same way he uses different languages to create multiple surfaces or textures and thus get nearer to the "sum of human wisdom" or the "full smile."

When seen in isolation, neither E.P. nor Mauberley can be said to possess the art of the "full smile, […] but an art / In profile." And while the failure of each involves a lack of connection to the modern world, both E.P. and Mauberley represent two extreme "cases" of disassociation, and it is through "COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen [or poet] with another"(17) that the stages of Pound's poetics are further realized and clarified. Thus the first stage of Mauberley's divorce from the world is articulated in this way:

For three years, diabolus in the scale,

He drank ambrosia,

All passes, ANANGKE prevails, 

Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.

He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,

Amid her galaxies,

NUKTIS'AGALMA (Mauberley II, 1-7)

Readers should not be surprised if, upon reading the first line, they hear E.P. whispering from the grave, for the line is nearly the exact double of the first line of his epitaph, which reads, "For three years, out of key with his time," but with some important differences. Indeed, the lines contain the origins of both figures' failures, and what follows each is an articulation or, as the case may be, a consequence of those failures. Even though E.P. “strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry,” he did so at the expense of involving the present, of finding a poetry that was demonstrably relevant to the world in which he lived, the consequence of which being that "He passed from men's memory in l'antrentuniesme / De son eage."

E.P.'s obsession with the past and, therefore, his indulgence in it finds its match in Mauberley, who, as a way of dealing with his own "diabolus in the scale, / […] drank ambrosia, […] moved amid her phantasmagoria." So while E.P. discarded the things of his time for the past (perhaps as a reaction the "savage" half of the country), Mauberley's "devil,” his consuming "urge to convey the relation/ Of eye-lid and cheek bone/ By verbal manifestation," compelled him to abandon the sensual world of "wide-banded irides/And botticellian sprays implied/ In their diastasis" for "phantasmagoria" and "aerial flowers," a process that sets him drifting toward "the final estrangement." 

Again, the idea of an art in profile resurfaces, for both E.P. and Mauberley, because of their preoccupations and lack of the reference point the modern world has to offer, share a limited perspective, the perspective of a "consciousness disjunct." As noted above, Mauberley's disassociation with the world is a result of his inability to go beyond a merely "verbal manifestation" and align himself with the sensual world from which the manifestations derive. Thus, in the words of The Age Demanded,

The glow of porcelain 

Brought no reforming sense

To his perception of the social inconsequence.

Thus, if her colour 

Came against his gaze, 

Tempered as if

It were through a perfect glaze

He made no immediate application 

Of this relation of the state

To the individual, the month was more temperate 

Because this beauty had been. (15-16)

Mauberley is clearly guilty of art for its own sake, for he is incapable of moving beyond his own subjective perceptions and observing and using the relationship between them to arrive at a sense of continuity, not isolation. For Mauberley, art does not bring a "reforming sense / Of the social inconsequence"; on the contrary, the value of art exists, for Mauberley, in proportion to how much and readily it mollifies his individual existence or "current exacerbations." Consequently, his art and its effects are short-lived, but Mauberley would perhaps be consoled by reminding himself that "the month was more temperate / Because this beauty had been."

It is here, amid these "ambrosial circumstances," that the first stirrings of "An hedonist" are heard. The "current exacerbations" prove to be too much for Mauberley because he lacks "perceptivity," the power to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus he becomes absorbed in what is easiest, cheapest, nearest.  He wants "Something for the modern stage. . . Made with no loss of time," to be delighted with the imaginary / Audition of the phantasmal sea surge." But this ambrosial stupor leaves Mauberley

Incapable of the least utterance or composition, 

Emendation, conservation of the "better tradition," 

Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, 

August attraction or concentration.

The reader must wonder how important it is to be affected by "'the march of events"' of his or her time if this is what happens as a result. But by putting the phrase (and a somewhat clichéd phrase at that) in quotation marks, Pound manages to mark it, to set it apart. This, taken together with Mauberley's inability to select not only from the "better tradition," but from his own time as well, suggests that Pound does not intend us to equate being "unaffected by ‘the march of events’” with being "out of key" with one's time. Indeed, it seems more likely that, if associating the "march of events" with the sensational, Pound wants a poetics that is selective, and separates the "better" and "insubstantial manna" from one's own time as well as from the "better tradition."

Both E.P. (who is absorbed in the past), and Mauberley (who drifts anesthetized "Amid aerial flowers), risk "Exclusion from the world of letters" and isolation by failing to relate their arts to the world in which they live, and yet each persona engenders a poetics that is essential to the other. By comparing them the reader learns that a connection to the "better tradition" is essential to a vital poetics, particularly when this relationship involves the world in which one lives. Through this relationship, a sense of continuity is created for the individual, and thus a hedge against his or her perceiving the world as nothing but an "overblotted / Series / of intermittencies." 

Mauberley engenders the need to resist "the chaff," to refine one's medium by selecting what's "better" from one's time, a process that requires a knowledge of the tradition, without which the poet or individual floats "amid aerial flowers" because s/he lacks a means of comparison. Therefore, in their extreme forms, both E.P.'s and Mauberley's approaches are, ultimately, equally deficient. Apart, the two figures are like "The still stone dogs, / Caught in metamorphosis," but when read in conjunction, and when the past represented by E.P. is resuscitated by the present as it is embodied in Mauberley, they help "to designate / [Pound's] new found orchid."

FOOTNOTES

[1] In ABC of Reading, Pound writes: “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (17).

“The Dawn” of Ezra Pound: a draft discovered

by A. David Moody

In August 1908 Ezra Pound travelled from Venice to London determined to make it there as a poet. In Venice he had self-published A Lume Spento, a collection of poems he had brought with him from America. In London he quickly arranged for the publication of A Quinzaine For This Yule / Being selected from a Venetian sketch-book – “San Trovaso”—that appeared in December. He had had his father send over some of his “mss.”^[1], and in December he told him, “As for the other songs you are sending.– perhaps I can make out of them a book that will suit you better [than “the ‘15'”].– they need an awful lot of finishing tho before they’ll do to print”.^[2]  Then in early January he reported that “‘The Portal’ my next opus is coming on, should like it to appear in April or May”.^[3]  “The Portal” evidently became “The Dawn”, which he read “at the Shakespears, after lunch” in February, and which he declared “finished” on the 22nd.^[4]  “The ‘Dawn’ is a sequence of prose and verse”, he explained, “The poems being from the last lot I had you send over to me.”^[5]  

Elkin Mathews published Pound’s Personae in April, but would not “begin to print the ‘Dawn’ until ‘Personae’ has paid for itself”.^[6]  Pound was now hoping “to strike a double blow with two volumns  published simultaneously about September (or before)”.^[7] However, Mathews published Exultations on its own in October, and Pound was then thinking that “The Dawn” would come out from Dent, possibly in the following spring along with The Spirit of Romance.^[8]  In the event Mathews agreed in April 1910 to publish both “The Dawn” and Canzoni “as his fall exposition of yrs. truly”.^[9] 

News of that agreement reached Pound in Sirmione in May, and his first thought was that he should “see that matter through” while in London in June—he would be there briefly for about ten days before sailing for New York on the 18^th. But then he began to have second thoughts about “The Dawn”, as he confessed to Margaret Cravens: 

I’ve consented to have published a certain prose & verse sequence which I did some time ago. Of course its full of faults and au contraire it has “something or other” or sometimes I think it has.

??????—and a lot more of ’em. Is it sanity or merely an unworthy cynicism that remarks to me on the habits of those literati who having gotten under sail dump their earlier work on a defenceless public—oh well any way, I’m printing a few canzoni with it, & my present howl is because I want to write something better than anything I’ve yet done to serve as an excuse for a questionable proceeding.^[10]

In his next letter to her, a few days later, he wrote: “I have withdrawn my permission for the exposition of my earlier poetic attempts & look forth on Garda with a clearer conscience”.^[11] While Pound was back in London Mathews mailed the manuscript of “The Dawn” to his temporary address in Hammersmith, and it appears to have been lost in the post. Pound protested to Mathews, “‘The Dawn’ has not been heard of at this end of the line, and it seems to me to have been about the acme of carelessness to have sent it unregistered”.^[12]  Nothing more was seen or heard of that “prose and verse sequence” in Pound’s lifetime, and it was put down as a lost work.

Some extracts from it came to light in 1984 as an appendix to the collection of Ezra Pound’s and Dorothy Shakespear’s early letters. Dorothy had written out ten of the poems in a manuscript headed 

Extracts from a set of M.S.S. verses entitled “‘The Dawn’, For it is a little book of  her praises” /--by Ezra Pound  Feb. 1909.^[13]

It seems likely that these extracts were what Pound read after lunch at the Shakespear’s. They gave some notion of the kind of work “The Dawn” would have been—four of the poems came from the “Hilda’s Book”, put together about 1906-7^[14], and the rest were in the same vein. But there was no indication of the prose element of the sequence. About that, and about the sequence as a whole, one could only speculate.

Almost exactly one hundred years after “The Dawn” was lost in the post “a poem entitled ‘The Dawn’” was discovered among the papers of Douglass Paige, the editor of The Letters of Ezra Pound. 1907-1941 (1951).^[15]  Presumably it had come into his possession while he was gathering material for that edition in Rapallo in 1948. It was “typed on watermarked paper that appears to be a hundred years old”.^[16]  Internal evidence suggests that this is the sequence as Pound drafted it in January and February 1909.

There are 25 sheets, the first a title-page, “The Dawn / of / Ezra Pound”, and the last sheet blank except for “Scripsit. / Ezra Pound”. The “dedication page” (thus indicated) reads as in Dorothy’s “Extracts”, “The Dawn / For it is a little book of her praises”, but adds “It is for Ysolt”, and the year “Anno Beatudine Nostro  /  One thousand Nine Hundred Nine”,  which might be rendered as “In the Year of Our Beatitude / 1909”. Facing the dedication is a poem to be set in italic, “And all who read these lines shall love her then”—in fact the first eight lines of “To La Contessa Bianzifior (Cent. XIV)” which had appeared in A Quinzaine. Overleaf there is a prose sentence addressed to the reader. Then on “P.5.” the prose and verse sequence proper gets under way with “Pars Prima”, and a “Prologue” dated “Jan. 1909”. There are fifteen poems in this first part, eleven of them carried over from “Hilda’s Book”, which makes this part a condensed version of that then unpublished work, with the one significant addition of “I can not bow to woo thee”. In “Pars II” there are only five poems, all new—two of these were included in Dorothy’s “Extracts. “Pars III” has just two poems, both associated with Venice—“When I behold the dawn’s reflection”, a variant version of “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June”, included in A Quinzaine ; and “Roundel” from the San Trovaso Notebook—both are included in Dorothy’s “Extracts”. The final line of “this little book of her praises” is “LAUS DEO”, “praise be to God”, the closing words of Rossetti’s version of La Vita Nuova.^[17]

It is apparent that “The Dawn” is a vita nuova which begins in but then goes beyond “Hilda’s Book” in its “tale of Love the revealer, of Love the door and way into the intelligence, of Love infinite ‘That moves the sun and all the other stars’.”^[18]  In the prose narrative of “The Dawn” we are told that among the “excellencies” of his lady were “the strange harmony or kinship . . . between her and the forest” (Pars I,VII), as set forth in two poems carried over from “Hilda’s Book”, “Rendez-vous” (“She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood”), and “The Tree” (“I stood still and was a tree amid the wood”). A second “excellency” was that “she brought unto me a certain power of dreaming”, as in “Li Bel Chasteus”, a dream of their dwelling at Tintagoel. Such dreaming out of Bédier’s version of the romance of Tristan and Iseult,^[19] with the understanding of Dryad’s kinship with nature, are as far as love had led the poet in “Hilda’s Book”. He had aspired, as in the poem beginning “A wondrous holiness hath touched me”, to be “lifted”, as Dante was by Beatrice, “above all terrene things”; but Hilda would keep to her role as “Dryad”, and in “The Dawn” that line becomes the less definite “Luring my spirit from all terrene things”. There is also this new recognition, “And then the power passed”.  

No “power” was invoked in “Hilda’s Book”, but it is invoked now in the new poem in the first part of “The Dawn”, “I can not bow to woo thee”.^[20]  The first stanza in effect sums up and dismisses “Hilda’s Book”:-

I can not bow to woo thee

With leaves of words and kisses of the flowers,

Nor may I scatter dew upon the fragrant grass 

Of old sweet love tales of the days foredone,

Nor in the murmurous twilight on the tower stair

May I bend down and kneel beside thee worshipping

With whispers that as far heard bells ring tremulous.

All these have I known once, and passed,

And they are now as shadows mid the curtains of the wind.

And the reason he can not seek her in that past fashion is this:--

For, ever as I am swept upward to the centre of all truth,

Rapt, as in that great involving flame, 

Thee must I bear ever with me,

Calling ever from the midst thereof, “Follow!”, “Follow!”

 

And in the glory of our meeting shall the power be reborn,

And together in the midst of this power

Must we, each outstriving each, cry eternally:

“I come. Go thou yet further!”  

 . . . . . .

This is the kind of uplifting power associated with the musician Katherine Ruth Heyman, as in “Scriptor Ignotus”—“she ’twas that played him power at life’s morn”. In “Orbi Cantum Primum”, an unfinished draft towards a long poem after Dante’s Divine Comedy written about 1907, she figures as “The Spirit of Power . . . bidding me be strong to go forward”.^[21]  There is reference to her “calling in THE meeting of the Winds”, known only in a page of rough drafting, in which “Two great winds met, strong-blowing, rejoicing . and they blew each other free of earth-dust and mounted to the stars. . . . . to the Gates of God”.^[22]   Against the vision of “The Spirit of Power” are set these lines, expressing disillusion with the love celebrated in “Hilda’s Book”:

The   illusion . 

The   Beatrice  face . 

The   illusion  . the passionate kissing

and   return  of   dustiness   of  the   way  .

Later in the draft there is this distinction, “Between the false dawn of my youth and the true / Dawn of high self consciousness”.^[23]  That could well stand as an epigraph to “The Dawn”.

That the “Hilda’s Book” poems now tell of what is past is made explicit in the “Prologue” to the first part of “The Dawn”:

Now, that I am in a far land and aweary with the dust of many ways, these fragments of my youth’s dear book are sent to me. And I, in turn, because they come to me as cool wind when the brow is hot or as water when the throat begins to parch, give them again to you others, who have perhaps forgotten, even more than I, the roses of yester-year. And as the refreshed memory has been gracious unto me; so may the memories that these songs stir within you be gracious,

                                                                                    O fratelli miei.   / Jan. 1909. 

Throughout the first part the prose has that distancing effect, presenting the poems as recovered from sometimes dim memories. 

The poems in “Pars II” confirm the distance from “Hilda’s Book”. “The Mist” begins, “‘I can not seem to see your face at all.”, and ends, “Which minds me of a song thy heart hath sung / And shows thee kin of all the elfin-kind.”  “Egaré”, i.e. “distracted”, speaks of that song, but he “can not seem to hold it here”, and hears but what his memory of her words now sings—

 “An angel and a cup of wonderment,

 And flowers that you dreamed and brought me, sweet

As dreams may find spring rain.”  These things were blent

In child-sweet words as skill can not attain,

And through it all I knew your heart did greet

Some wandered heart not then to yours made plain.

There is an ambiguity in that last line—is the “wandered heart” his or another’s?—but either way the distance and the difference remain.

The prose introduction to “Pars III” locates it in his recent time in Venice, and effectively leaves behind “Hilda’s Book” and the Hilda/Ysolt complex. It moves rather into that ethereal realm evoked in the second part of “I can not bow to woo thee”, the realm in which he may meet the Spirit of his powers and with her be blown free of earth-dust and mount to the stars, “to the Gates of God”:-

And of her coming let this be known: that I being in a far land where truth and dream are merged and where beauty is grown so still that prayer alone is left to us, even in this land, high dwelling above all discord, in a place where many a time the winds had so held me in the power of their arms that I lost consciousness of earth most utterly and seemed only to float upon them, even as shadows do upon the waters in that city of mirage:

Even in this land she came unto me, not as a woman of clay might come, but even in that manner most befitting her. Even as the wraith of that eternal beauty whereof she is, as it were, the symbol or embodiment. So she came unto me. In token whereof have I written the vers here following.  

When I behold the Dawn’s reflection

                            Rise in the West and stretch her arms toward me,

                            Making herself one splendid gueredon,

                            Witholding naught but giving utterly,

                            All that she is becomes my halido[m].

                            Behold I take her clear virginity.

                            When I have clasped the Dawn’s reflection

                            Unto my heart, I ask God’s benison,

                            That I remain her lover steadfastly

                            So naught can set aside this unity

                            That she and I have set our bond upon.

                            ’Tis why I serve the Dawn’s reflection.^[24]

And when she had again faded from me, leaving me naught but the truth of all these things and a perfect joy born out of it; as it were bidding me to follow her even into that realm of all the images . . . .

In the Spirit of Romance, Pound would insist

That the Vita Nuova is the idealization of a real woman can be doubted by no one who has, even in the least degree, that sort of intelligence whereby it was written, or who has known in any degree the passion whereof it treats.^[25]

One does not doubt that “Hilda’s Book” is the idealization of a real young woman; and that in “Scriptor Ignotus”, and possibly in “I can not bow to woo thee”, Katherine Ruth Heyman was being idealized. But there is no sense of any real person embodied, if that is the word, in this reflection of the Dawn. 

In the San Trovaso notebook there is a note of the experience formulated in “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June”, and this removes it altogether from any personal relationship:

All art begins in the physical discontent (or torture) of loneliness and partiality.

     It is <was> to fill this lack that man first spun shapes out of the void. And with the intensity <intensifying> of this longing gradually came unto him power, power over the essences of the dawn, over the filaments of light and the warp of melody.

     And I?

     Of the dawn’s reflexion as you see here, feeling the flow of the essences of beauty

[here color chiefly, as I remember] until they gradually grouped themselves into form.

     Of such perceptions rise the ancient myths of the origin of demi-gods. Even as the ancient myths of metamorphosis rise out of flashes of cosmic consciousness. . . . 

     Perhaps some will dispute my term “form” as used above. Perception of form is not perception of matter but of space matter does or might fill. But I will not dispute nor claim that I use the word in the ordinary sense. 

     Certainly the beauty of the morning of which I write took unto itself a personality.

     Perhaps of the spirit of beauty . . . ^[26]  

Here we are in the realm indicated by an odd note of Pound’s tucked into his 1903 Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Purgatorio, and apparently commenting upon “Amor che muove il sol e l’altre stele”. A sentence on the soul from Plato’s Phaedrus is followed by this: “For Aegupton:- the soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate & traverses the whole of heaven in diverse forms appearing”.^[27]  In “Aegupton” in A Lume Spento the speaker is one “who knoweth the roads / Thru the sky and the wind thereof is my body”, and who has beheld “the Lady of Life . . . Green and grey is her raiment”. These then, and likewise the winds, the imagined woman, and the dawn’s reflection in “The Dawn”, are to be read as manifestations of “the soul or animate being”, to Dante “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”, and to Pound in his exaltation “the spirit of beauty”.^[28]  Also relevant would be this statement of October 1907: “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others.”^[29]

The final poem, spoken  as he rises up to follow his vision into the “realm of all the images”, addresses her as “Soul of my soul”, and “the soul of beauty”:-

I come unto thee through the hidden ways,

Soul of my soul, whose beauty quivereth

Within her eyes, to whom my former days

As wined libation poured I, while my breath

Strove to her homage in unskilful lays

And bade my heart make his high vaunt ’gainst death.

I come unto thee through the hidden ways

Who art the soul of beauty and whose praise

Or colour, or song, or form championeth

And of whom Time, as but an heral[d], saith

‘Trust though thou sense not, spite of my delays

Her whom I bring thee through the hidden ways.^[30]

There is a definite reference back to “Scriptor Ignotus”, but now the musician he would glorify is quite etherealised and he must follow her. She has become what Beatrice is said to have become for Dante in that poem, “that lady dwelling in his inmost soul”, and so the very “soul of his soul”.

Somewhere behind all this is Rossetti’s prose story “Hand and Soul”. “D.G.R Hand and Soul and Vita Nuova basic in E.P.’s paideuma”, he would tell Olivia Rossetti Agresti when writing to her from St Elizabeths in 1955.^[31] A direct connection between the close of “The Dawn” and Rossetti’s version of Dante’s La Vita Nuova is noted above; and it is safe to assume the influence of that version throughout both “Hilda’s Book” and “The Dawn”. As for the prose story “Hand and Soul”, a telling phrase from it, “inglesi matti sul misticismo”, “the English [are] mad about mysticism”, had stayed permanently in his mind; but it was apparently the “finale” that had particularly impressed itself on Pound in his youth.^[32]  The story concerns Chiaro, an early Italian painter, and how he came to produce a certain compelling portrait of a woman. He had pursued fame, won it, and found it hollow; and faith too had failed him. One night, as he is thinking that his work has perhaps done more harm than good, suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head bowed without stirring. The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed a pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain. The silence was a painful music, that made the blood ache in his temples; and he lifted his face and his deep eyes.

A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time. It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams. . . . As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro: not, as it were from her mouth or in his ears; but distinctly between them. “I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. . . .”^[33]

And so the finale unfolds. The image of the artist’s soul bids him paint her as he sees her, and he does that, and signs the portrait “Manus Animam pinxit”, “The Hand painted the Soul”. Pound quoted that “motto”, as he called it in his February 1956 letter to O.R.A, in “Aegupton”, and borrowed “Green and grey is her raiment” for his “Lady of Life”.

One can see why Pound in 1910 might think that his “Dawn” sequence had “something or other”—after all he had been mad about that sort of mysticism for much of his former days. But in London he had come under new influences, perhaps strongest among them Ford Madox Hueffer’s, and he may well have become uncomfortably aware of its faults. For one striking instance, “soul of my soul . . . to whom my former days / As wined libation poured I”, might well be termed “nobody language”, not natural speech.^[34]  As he would confess, in writing about his versions of Cavalcanti, “I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.”  He had been “bogged in Dante Gabriel and in Algernon”, in the sediment of “dead English” present in my own available vocabulary”.^[35]  And Hueffer, Pound would testify, “sent me back to my own proper effort, namely toward using the living tongue”.^[36]  The full force of Hueffer’s criticism might not have hit him until it was expressed in his mockery of Canzoni in 1911, but it was very likely having its effect already in 1910 when he concluded that “The Dawn” should not be published.

FOOTNOTES

[1]. See EP to his father (HLP), c.23 Sept. and 21 Oct. 1908, Ezra Pound to his Parents. Letters 1895-1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 135, 140. (Hereafter EP/Parents.)

[2]. EP to HLP, Dec. 23 [1908], EP/Parents 149.

[3]. EP to HLP, 3 Jan. 1909, EP/Parents 150.

[4]. EP to HLP, 21 and 22 Feb. 1909, EP/Parents 160, 161.

^[5]  EP to HLP, [?24 March 1909], EP/Parents 164.

^[6]  EP to HLP, [after 27 May 1909], EP/Parents 171.

^[7]  EP to HLP, April 30 [1909], EP/Parents 170.

^[8]  EP to IWP, Oct. 11[1909], EP/Parents 194.

^[9]  EP to HLP, 8 May [1910], EP/Parents 234.

^[10]  EP to Margaret Cravens, [9 May 1910], Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens. A Tragic Friendship. 1910-1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988), 33-34. (Hereafter EP/MC.)

^[11]  EP to Margaret Cravens, [14 May 1910], EP/MC 35.

^[12]  EP to Elkin Mathews, [1910], as cited in James G. Nelson, Elkin Mathews. Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 276. Nelson seems to have been unaware that EP had withdrawn “The Dawn” before returning to London from Italy and consequently makes one or two false assumptions.

^[13]  This set of Extracts was first published as Appendix II in Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear. Their Letters: 1909-1914 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 361-68. 

^[14]  “Hilda’s Book” first published with H.D.’s End to Torment. A memoir of Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York: New Directions, 1979), 67-84.

^[15]  Carver Blanchard, a close friend of  Paula Paige, widow of D. D. Paige, wrote to John Gery about the discovery in late fall of  2010.

^[16]  Carver Blanchard to David Moody, March 28, 2011, enclosing a photocopy of the typescript.

^[17]  “Dante and his Circle:The New Life”, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 346. Reproduced by Pound in The Spirit of Romance (London: Peter Owen, 1952), 125.

^[18]  Ezra Pound on Dante’s Vita Nuova in 1910, The Spirit of Romance (1952),120.

^[19]  H.D. wrote in End to Torment, “He brought me the Portland, Maine, Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story. He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder” (23). The Mosher reprint of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, retold by J. Bédier, translated into English by H. Belloc, was published in 1904.

^[20]  The version copied by Dorothy varies in a few minor details from that in “The Dawn” typescript. Collected Early Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1977) gives a much revised version from the Pound Archive, with the title “The Summons” and marked “Finale” by Pound (CEP 262-3, 323n.).

^[21]  “Orbi Cantum Primum”, printed in A. David Moody, “Dante as the Young Pound’s Virgil . . . Some Early Drafts and Fragments”, Agenda 34.3 (1997) 75-81—the passage cited is on p.77. For a fuller discussion of the Hilda/K.R.H. complex see A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. vol.I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 34 ff. In the brief note on p.85 re Dorothy’s copy of  extracts from “The Dawn” it is stated in error that “The Summons” was in “Hilda’s Book”.

^[22]  “The Meeting of the Winds”, typescript among “College Notes”, Ezra Pound Papers YCal MSS 43, 3770, Beinecke.

^[23]  “Orbi Cantum Primum”, Agenda 34.3 (1997) 79.

^[24]  This is a radically altered version of “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June” which Pound had included in A Quinzaine . . . selected from a Venetian sketch-book, a collection dedicated “To / The Aube of the West Dawn”. That version had this headnote: “From the tale ‘How Malrin chose for his Lady the reflection of the Dawn and was thereafter true to her’.”  There was also this note: “I think from such perceptions as this arose the ancient myths of the demi-gods”. In fact the prose tale “Malrin”, in A Lume Spento, placed him as the wise fool dreaming in a heaven that seems a medley of images out of Pound’s medieval reading. 

^[25]  The Spirit of Romance (1952), 126.

^[26]  I give the note as in Collected Early Poems 322. 

^[27] The note, in red ink on a sheet from a small notepad, is folded into Pound’s copy of the Purgatorio, acquired in 1904, and now in the Ezra Pound Library, Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. The passages noted are Phaedrus 245c. 246b-e, and 259.

^[28]  On “Aegupton” and this matter in general see Hugh Witemeyer, “The Phantastikon of 1908”, The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, 1981), 44-59. See also Boris de Rachewiltz, “Pagan and Magic Elements in Ezra Pound’s Works”, New Approaches to Ezra Pound ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 178-9.

^[29]  E.P. to Viola Baxter Jordan, [Oct. 24, 1907], “Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan”, Paideuma I.1 (1972) 109.

^[30]  In the San Trovaso Notebook “I come unto thee trough the hidden ways” has the title “Roundel after Joachim du Bellay”, and the attribution “[Cino]”.

^[31]  E.P. to O.R.A, 6 January 1955,“I Cease Not to Yowl”. Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 174.

^[32]  See E.P. to O.R.A, 13 January 1956,“I Cease Not to Yowl” 225.

^[33]  D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul”, The Bibelot. Volume I (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1895), 242-3.

^[34]  For “nobody language”, a term Pound applied to Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower in 1934, see Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound . . . (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 81.

^[35]  “Cavalcanti—1910/1931”, Make It New (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 399-400.

^[36]  E.P., “Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford: Obit” (1939), Selected Prose 1909-1965, edited by William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 432.

[Reprinted from Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 31-40.  For a full transcript of “The Dawn of Ezra Pound” see Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 15-30.

All quotations from “The Dawn of Ezra Pound” Copyright © Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound.  Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.]

Ezra Pound’s ‘Insanity’ & The Muncie Papers

by A. David Moody

In February 1946 a Washington D. C. court decided that Ezra Pound, who was under indictment for treason, was of ‘unsound mind’ and would therefore not be put on trial. An experienced and respected journalist who was present, Albert Deutsch, wrote in P.M., ‘I have no desire to persecute a mentally sick person . . . Yet I must frankly state my opinion that the case of Ezra Pound, involving the gravest crime possible, has been handled incompletely and inadequately by the Justice Department, and by the four psychiatrists who examined the defendant.’^[1] The lawyers representing the government, he wrote, had ‘acted throughout as if they were going through the motions’. Most notably, they had failed to submit as evidence the reports of three psychiatrists who had examined Pound for the Justice Department when he was being held under arrest in Italy and had found him perfectly sane.

The finding of insanity has remained suspect to this day, but the suspicion has been directed against the psychiatrists rather than the Justice Department. A widely held view is that Dr Overholser, the leading psychiatrist in the case, had been concerned to protect Pound from a possible sentence of death and had persuaded the other psychiatrists to follow his lead.^[2] But now some new evidence has come to light that throws suspicion back onto the Justice Department and calls for a revision of the story of Pound’s non-trial.

The new material comes from the files of Dr Wendell Muncie, the psychiatrist appointed by Julian Cornell, Pound’s attorney. Dr Muncie’s Pound files, scorched by a house fire which they survived, were recently given to me by his son, Peter Muncie. They contain his correspondence with Cornell and with the other psychiatrists, his notes of their examinations of Pound—these revealing for the first time what was actually said in those examinations—and also cuttings of Deutsch’s reports on the court proceedings. What now comes clear is that the several parties involved, the prosecution, the defence, the psychiatrists, and the judge, while nominally opposed or impartial, were effectively all working for the same outcome.

The FBI had begun investigating Pound in October 1942 in response to President Roosevelt’s naming him as one of a number of Americans in Europe ‘aiding Hitler et al on the radio’. ‘Why should we not indict them for Treason’, he asked the Attorney General, ‘even though we might not be able to try them until after the war?’  Pound had been broadcasting over Rome Radio since January 1941, and had not desisted when the United States entered the war in December of that year. He kept on until the fall of Mussolini’s regime in July 1943.  In that month a Grand Jury brought in an Indictment charging Pound and others with treason. ‘These people have freely elected, at a time when their country is at war, to devote their services to the enemies of the United States’, the Attorney General declared, ‘They have betrayed the first and foremost sacred obligation of American citizenship.’

Pound heard about the indictment while listening to the BBC. He at once sent a letter via the Swiss legation in Rome to the Attorney General, setting out at some length his defence. The key point was the claim that he had been responsibly exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech. ‘I do not believe that the simple fact of speaking over the radio, wherever placed, can in itself constitute treason’, he wrote, ‘I think that must depend on what is said, and on the motives for speaking’.^[3] He was touching there on the requirement in U. S. law that for treason to be proved there must be evidence of a deliberate intent to do harm to the United States.  Pound’s claim would be that he was attempting to inform Americans of facts they needed to know about Europe and about their own history, and that in doing so he was fulfilling his duty as an American citizen. His letter was filed unanswered, and was not mentioned in the later court proceedings.

An order for his arrest was sent to the U. S. forces in Italy, and an FBI agent set about gathering evidence there. When the war in Europe finally came to its end in early May 1945 Pound was picked up by a pair of bounty-hunting partisans, and would have been let go by their leader, but asked to be taken to a nearby U. S. command.  From there he was transferred to the U. S. Counter Intelligence Center in Genoa and became a prisoner of the U. S. government.  He was formally interrogated over three days, without the assistance of an attorney, and signed a sworn statement in which he declared himself ‘willing to return to the United States to stand trial on the charge of treason against the United States’.^[4] He supplemented his sworn statement with two further statements. All three documents, like his 1943 letter to the Attorney General, were perfectly clear and coherent, if from a sometimes egregious point of view.  And like that letter, these statements would not be mentioned in the court proceedings. Nor would it be mentioned that the two agents who had interrogated him over three days reported no signs of insanity.

On May 24 Pound was transferred to a U. S. Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa – a prison camp for the U. S. Army’s own criminals. He was to be held there while the FBI continued its search for evidence, and for witnesses. The law stipulated that there should be two witnesses to each alleged act of treason, and it was proving difficult to find Rome Radio technicians with a sufficient command of English to testify that they had been in the studio when Pound had recorded a specified talk that might be held to have been treasonous.  

At the D. T. C. Pound was placed in a specially reinforced cage, with a concrete floor, a flat wood and tar-paper roof, but otherwise open to the elements. A bright light shone on the cage through the night. There was a general order that he was not to be spoken to. After three weeks there an army psychiatrist was assigned to examine him in order to assess his mental condition, and another army psychiatrist provided a second opinion. They reported that Pound told them that he had had a ‘recent spell of confusion’ lasting some moments while exposed to the sun, and they advised that ‘prolonged exposure in present environment may precipitate a mental breakdown’. One observed ‘No paranoia, delusions nor hallucinations’, and the other ‘no evidence of psychosis, neurosis or psychopathy’. The second psychiatrist recorded without comment that the prisoner complained of ‘claustrophobia’.^[5]

In the light of these reports the camp commander had Pound moved from the cage to a tent in the medical compound. The Department of Justice, concerned about his mental competence to stand trial, asked for a further examination from another psychiatrist, and this took place on July 17. Major Weisdorf reported that his previous symptoms of anxiety and confusion had now cleared up. He noted a ‘prodigious flow of thought’ which sounded ‘on the whole relevant and coherent’; that Pound maintained that ‘he had done his utmost to prevent war and uphold the American Constitution’; and that he defended ‘his radio broadcasts on the Italian radio as the right of free speech and contends that he was not treasonable’. Weisdorf concluded that there was ‘no evidence of psychosis, or neurosis at the present time’.^[6] As Deutsch noted, the three psychiatrists’ reports were never submitted in evidence.

Through July to September Pound was composing in his prison tent by day, and by night on the Medical Center dispensary’s typewriter, the long sequence of cantos which would be published in 1948 as The Pisan Cantos. In October he completed his translation of two works of Confucius. In that month he was also engaged in correspondence with his wife, with his English lawyer, with his American publisher James Laughlin, and with others, about his defence when his case came to court. He wanted to defend himself, and was being strongly advised, by T. S. Eliot along with the rest, that he should rather have a competent counsel.

On November 17 he was flown back to the United States. There was a strict instruction that ‘Legal Jurisdiction requires that plane returning prisoner land at Bolling Field in the district of COLUMBIA and NOT at National Airport or other airports in the UNITED STATES.’^[7] Evidently the Justice Department wanted to ensure their direct control of the case. It arranged at about the same time for their Italian witnesses to be flown to America.

The day after his arrival Pound was brought from the District of Columbia jail for the preliminary arraignment before Chief Justice Bolitha J. Laws. He asked, in what the Washington Post called ‘a scholarly 10 minute debate’, to act in his own defence, but was told the case was too serious for that, and then agreed to have the court appoint an attorney to defend him. The formal arraignment was set down for November 27 and Pound was taken back to the jail. He was unaware that James Laughlin had already engaged Julian Cornell to undertake his defence. Cornell was a New York attorney and a special counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. He had been briefed by Laughlin, and they had listened together to recordings of several of Pound’s broadcasts and agreed they did not sound treasonable. Nonetheless they had decided that their strategy should be to avoid a trial by entering a plea of insanity.^[8]  

Cornell had informed the Justice Department in early November that ‘he had been retained to confer with Pound about his defense’, and had asked to be notified of his arrival. He was notified by telegram on the day of the preliminary arraignment and at once traveled down to Washington. He presented himself to Judge Laws as Pound’s counsel, but explained to him that he was appearing only ‘for the purpose of arraignment, which includes entering of a plea to the indictment and application for bail’.  He could not say whether he would undertake the defence. He also met with the Chief of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, Mr. McInerny, and with his assistant, Mr. Matlack, who would be in charge of the prosecution. He gathered from them, by his own account, that they regarded Pound’s case ‘as rather a mild one of its kind’, and concluded that on that account their opposition to the application for bail which he intended to make would not be too strenuous. Presumably he informed them, as he had intimated to Judge Laws, that he would be applying for bail on the grounds of mental illness. He was told that ‘three army psychiatrists who examined [Pound] found that he was suffering from claustrophobia’. It is not clear from Cornell’s account whether he was told at this meeting that those psychiatrists’ main finding had been that Pound was sane and fit to stand trial, but in any event he was aware of that finding shortly after.  

Cornell first saw Pound the next morning, and ‘discussed with him the possibility of pleading insanity as a defense’. If the court accepted the plea, he told him, then he could expect to be back in Italy in six months a free man. And Pound, Cornell was able to tell Laughlin, had no objection to pleading insanity. However, according to Dr Muncie’s notes, Pound would tell him that it had been a ‘tremendous shock’ when Cornell brought in ‘this method of handling the case’. What he had wanted all along was to establish his innocence.

At the formal arraignment on November 27 the government filed its indictment which specified seven overt acts of treason and named five witnesses. Pound was being called upon to answer for opinions expressed in just seven broadcasts. Beneath its legal rhetoric there was surprisingly little substance to the indictment, and perhaps not much conviction.  In 1950 Mr McInerny would be advised, following an internal Justice Department assessment of its case, that ‘extreme difficulty would be encountered in meeting our burden of proof if Pound were declared sane and the Government forced to trial’. There was insufficient evidence, he was told, ‘to meet the constitutional requirement of two witnesses to the same overt act or . . . the acts alleged could not properly be construed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’^[9] It would be surprising if there was not already some awareness of that in 1945.  And of course the Justice Department knew perfectly well what would be the consequence of the court’s accepting that Pound was unfit to plead.

Cornell had persuaded Pound ‘to remain mute rather than enter a plea of not guilty’, and he told the court that Pound was in no condition to answer the charge, and asked that a plea of not guilty be entered for him. He then made no attempt to address the indictment. Instead he presented a lengthy ‘Affidavit in Support of Application for Bail’ in which he declared, ‘I do not defend his actions, nor do I approve his sentiments’. His sole intent was to establish that Pound was suffering from mental illness, had long been suffering from mental illness, and that he was now in urgent need of medical care and should be released on bail to receive it.  The gist of his argument was that the harsh conditions under which Pound had initially been held in the D. T. C. had preyed upon an already weakened mind and brought on a ‘complete mental collapse and loss of memory’. Pound had been ‘stricken with violent and hysterical terror’, and a ‘period of violent insanity apparently began about mid-June, to endure for three months or more’. That would have been the period in which he was examined by the three army psychiatrists, and composed his Pisan Cantos. At the end of his affidavit Cornell declared his confidence that ‘a disinterested psychiatric investigation’ of Pound’s condition would show that he was urgently in need of medical treatment, and this not in a penal institution but ‘in a civilian hospital or sanatorium operated by the United States or by the District of Columbia’.

Mr Matlack, after a brief recess to allow him to look through Cornell’s submissions and consult the Justice Department, told the court that the government had no objection to a medical examination. Judge Laws then ordered that Pound ‘be transferred to Gallinger Hospital or such other hospital as may be designated by authorized officials of the United States for examination and observation and for treatment if found necessary’. He appointed three psychiatrists to examine Pound on behalf of the government. These were Dr Winfred Overholser, Superintendent of St Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane, a Federal institution; Dr Joseph L. Gilbert, in charge of the psychiatric ward at Gallinger Municipal Hospital; and Dr Marion King, Medical Director of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons.  

Cornell engaged Dr Wendell Muncie, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins and a psychiatrist in private practice, to provide an ‘independent examination by a private physician’ (M/P)^[10]. That was arranged in an exchange of telegrams on December 5. On December 6 Dr King wrote to Dr Muncie saying he had just learnt of his engagement to examine Pound, and extending, on behalf of all three government doctors, ‘a cordial invitation . . . to collaborate with us in this task’ (M/P).  Dr Muncie accepted the cordial invitation, apparently not seeing this collaboration as incompatible with his independence. To assist them Cornell provided all four doctors with (as they put it) ‘considerable material in the line of his writings and biographical data’, all of it tending to show that Pound had long been of unsound mind, had become insane in the D. T. C., and was now altogether unfit to plead or to face a trial. There is no definite indication that they were briefed on the evidence to the contrary held by the Justice Department, though Dr King at least did know that the reports of the Army psychiatrists had not suggested a complete physical or mental collapse (Torrey 192). What is clear is that the psychiatrists for the government were effectively directed by the defence, and that all four psychiatrists would be consulting together.

In his briefing letter to Muncie on December 6 Cornell stated, ‘it is conceded by the government that [Pound] became definitely insane during his imprisonment in Italy last summer’ (Cornell 30). There is nothing to that effect in the Court record; and indeed later in the month the prosecuting attorneys would say, outside the court but for the public record, that the Army psychiatrists had declared Pound sane and able to stand trial for treason. However, in the court proceedings they did not present those reports and in effect did concede Pound’s insanity.  Whether Cornell had had any encouragement from the Justice Department to believe what he told Muncie is an open question. But he did write in his account that he ‘expected that the government’s doctors would find Pound fit for trial in view of the fact that Army doctors at the military detention center in Pisa had found him sane enough and had sent him to the United States for trial’ (Cornell 35).

Dr King was the first to examine Pound and drafted a report on December 11. He found him astute, intelligent and cooperative, with no regrets for his acts, steadfast in his convictions, grandiose – as in his claim to have information of atom bomb capacity – and ‘querulous, egocentric, arrogant, critical and eccentric’. He concluded in that draft that Pound could not be considered mentally ill and thus absolved from responsibility.^[11] Dr Muncie reached the same conclusion when he first examined Pound on December 13, the day on which all four doctors met together at Gallinger Hospital. He thought Pound was ‘a plain psychopath’, meaning that he was someone who disregarded social rules and laws, was immature, unable to accept responsibility, and who rationalized his behaviour to make it seem reasonable. Since psychopaths were almost invariably held responsible for their actions, the implication was that Pound was fit to be tried. (Torrey 193)

When the four doctors conferred Overholser, who was at the time Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychiatric Association, put it to them that when psychiatrists disagreed in court it looked bad and tended to undermine the authority of the profession. He expressed the hope that they would all be able to agree on a diagnosis and present to the court a joint report, and that is what they did.  Dr King would alter his draft report. And Dr Muncie would later tell the FBI that after talking with Overholser and the others he went back and found that in the meantime Pound had become ‘completely incoherent’. (Torrey 194)

The notes he made at the time have now surfaced, and they give direct evidence of what Pound actually said to Muncie, and some indication of what Muncie made of it. There are two sets of notes, one hastily written in pencil, apparently in the course of an interview; the other and longer set in ink and apparently written up after the interviews were concluded.  Some details in the first set are incorporated into the fuller account, but not all. Not included was this, apparently a verbatim note: ‘“Tremendous shock when he [Cornell] brot in this method of handling the case . . . .wasn’t [  ?  ] my going to know I’m chucked in a crazyhouse”’; and later this, ‘I don’t think C wants me to sham crazy.’ What follows is Dr Muncie’s fuller and more considered account in its entirety. (For the sake of clarity some abbreviations and contractions have been spelt out in full.)

                                                                                                  Mr Ezra Pound

                                                                                                                Dec 13/45

     The pt. was examined at Gallinger Hosp. whither he had been sent by Judge Laws of the D. C. Court for observation , at the behest of his attorney, Mr Julian Cornell.

     He was lying in bed, and appeared glad to see Drs. Overholser, King, Gilbert & myself.  Dr. O. had told him I was coming .  

   He was pleasant, friendly, talkative, & circumstantial.  He wandered off the topic at hand and had to be brought back to the issues.  He was expansive, declared he was the tops in his literary field, & only in the case of T. S. Eliot had a pupil <perhaps> outdone the master. He described his <early> work as fragments, but necessary ones in the writing of an epic poem (the Cantos) which will do for the modern world what Homer did for the Ancient, & Dante for the Medieval worlds.  In order to do justice to this concept, which he declares he has had in his mind since before graduating from Hamilton College, he had to delve into Economics, history, comparative poetry etc. Actually then his work is a continuum, not unrelated fragments (or enthusiasms).

     He says critics, from the 2nd volume of his works on, have pronounced him on the decline, & the last work is always the worst.  

    He relates his experiences in the Army – & says he was insane from May – Sept /45, that there are memory gaps in that time he can’t account for, & that for 3 – 4 years preceding things are a bit hazy in that he couldn’t <(now)> put dates on events. 

     He feels he regained his mental equilibrium when he was given more humane care, & espec. when he was allowed to read & write & have his family as visitors – altho these latter events came more tardily <[  ?  ]> did care of his body needs. 

     He knew he was indicted for Treason by contacting the Swiss Embassy, in 1943, just as the Germans took over Rome – he escaped, dodged German concentration camp & returned to Rapallo, via 50 mile hike towards Rieti from Rome.  Yet he gave himself up voluntarily to the Americans because he felt he had information of the greatest value to the Intelligence.  He denies that he was afraid of the Partisans & says he could go back to Rapallo now to live in peace with everyone (& would like to do just that). 

     He says he thought he was being brought to the U S to give information. & <understood> that he had to come as a prisoner because it was the only legal method of accomplishing that, So he understood since his passport had expired he was not legally holdable by the State Dept.

     These incongruities are not solved (cleared).

     He thinks he shld be allowed freedom & be sent to Japan to aid in the rehabilitation of the Japanese people, because of his standing with a certain group of  [  ?    ] poets in Japan (thru his Fenollosa executorship)

     He doesn’t know what his standing in China is.  

     He denies AntiSemitism he says he has [belaboured?] the Jews, but also has done the same to the British, Americans & others.  Yet just 2 mins. before he had referred to some jew as a dirty Kike.

     The inconsistencies are marked & he offers no reasonable explanations for them.

     He has always been an asocial person at least unconcerned with popular opinion re him.

     Kicked out of Wabash for a love affair with his President’s girl friend, he was glad to go, for he felt before then very [  ?  ] to Europe. he lived a life with little regard for the conventions :

     Married a woman <(English)> he didn’t love as her mother wanted a son – a fraternal relationship exists between them – she has a boy now 19 probably by another man at his implied suggestion.  This boy in the Amer Army at Bremen now.  Mother is fond of him & he of patient.

     He has had a long affair with Olga (American) & has a daughter by her – both devoted to him – he didn’t plan on this being so permanent an affair.  but afraid  to break it up as feared  ‘madness or suicide’ of Olga – saw an Amer actual suicide & saw wife of T S Eliot go insane & feared both.

     They all live nearby.

     Patient with Olga to being taken captive– with wife no sex relation since the son’s birth.             

Drinks little – wine 

     [     ?   ]

     Health generally good - fistula – operated 2-3x.  Never used toilet paper a/c this / wet cotton instead.

     Lost 40# during war – regained 20# since on Army food.

     Says has alienated only some second raters but has kept all his real top notch friends – except Hemingway who is an out with him for personal reasons (not divulged, except that he needled him unmercifully)

     Names only 3-4 intimates Eliot, Cummings, Ford Madox Ford.  [Declares?] knew G. Stein well.

     Says might have lived more wisely had he translated Confucius 20 yrs before he did.   

     Has played about him at will & enjoyed it.

     Deliberately kept Amer. citizenship despite o’seas 37 yrs as felt it his obligation to fight for citizens rights under Constitution.

     Gets back to early unpleasant experience at hands of bureaucrats.

     Broke with mother at 17 a/c mother invaded his mail.  Never close to her.  Regarded father with great affectn – he died 2 yrs ago.  Mother & father lived nearby.

    Wife came into £200,000 in 1938 – son in boarding school in England  

    He knows something of gravity of his situation, but feels he was not a traitor – that he was working for the real rights of Americans, and that he has a good defence provided the jurors can understand.  

    He feels he is mentally not able to assist his counsel in defense of his case.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Olga a good violinist.  Mother felt she as with all Amer. girls (contrast to continental or Europeans) too all out for romance, not practical, & wanted a child by his body  – felt it ought to be  -- disappointed that it a girl – though he not.

 

Psychotic

              1) Circumstantial

              2) Grandiose —

              3) Memory difficulty  /  from May-Sept  /  <(can’t check this)>  

               [   ?    ] vagueness before  for  3-4 yrs  / (retrograde?)

              4) Inconsistencies in attitudes not perceived.

              5) Vague argument – I can’t follow well & neither can the other Drs.  

                                          How could a jury or a counsel.  

 

That was the basis on which Dr Muncie, along with the psychiatrists for the government, certified that Pound was insane.

The first paragraph of the four psychiatrists’ joint report to the court gave a brief history of the defendant’s life and career, this drawn from Cornell’s Affidavit and his other briefing papers, and stating that ‘He has long been recognized as eccentric, querulous, and egocentric’. That was followed by their own finding:

At the present time he exhibits extremely poor judgment as to his situation, its seriousness and the manner in which the charges are to be met. He insists that his broadcasts were not treasonable, but that all of his radio activities have stemmed from his self-appointed mission to ‘save the Constitution’. He is abnormally grandiose, is expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness, and distractibility. In our opinion, with advancing years his personality, for many years abnormal, has undergone a further distortion to the extent that he is now suffering from a paranoid state which renders him unfit to advise properly with counsel or to participate intelligently and reasonably in his own defense.  He is, in other words, insane and mentally unfit for trial, and is in need of care in a mental hospital. (Cornell 36-7)

In the light of this brief report Judge Laws ruled on December 21 that ‘in accordance with the recommendation of the examining physicians, the defendant, Ezra Pound, be sent to St Elizabeths Hospital for treatment and examination.’ Late that afternoon Pound was transferred to St Elizabeths and assigned, as ‘Criminal No. 76028’, to Howard Hall, the maximum security ward for the most dangerous and violent of the criminally insane.

Immediately after the hearing the prosecuting attorneys told the press that they would be calling for a formal hearing before a jury. They mentioned the Army psychiatrists’ reports, and said that it was possible Pound was now feigning insanity to avoid a trial and possible death sentence.  They gave every appearance of being determined to bring Pound to trial. However, when Cornell wrote to Dr Muncie on January 11, to inform him that the government would be making its ‘application to the court next Friday, January 18th, for an order directing a formal hearing, presumably before a jury, on the question of sanity’, he added this startling revelation:  

I understand that the government’s lawyers have no question regarding the correctness of the medical report, but in view of the necessity of returning witnesses to Italy, they want to have his commitment to St Elizabeths Hospital made more definite and final.  I presume, therefore, that the hearing will be rather perfunctory .....(M/P)

Evidently the government’s lawyers had let him know that they did not intend to seek to bring Pound to trial, but were content to have him committed definitely and finally to St Elizabeths Hospital for the insane. What that meant was made very plain by Dr Overholser when questioned by Albert Deutsch before the formal hearing took place: ‘I’d like to make it clear that St Elizabeths is no sanctuary for criminal suspects. No legal device can be used to set Pound free so long as the indictment stands against him. I think the public is pretty well protected’^[12]. Evidently he too knew that Pound’s indefinite commitment to St Elizabeths was a foregone outcome.

On admission to St Elizabeths Pound was put through a thorough medical and mental examination. The report noted that he had given a very full account of everything that had happened to him since his arrest, a defence of his broadcasts, and an outline of his social, economic, and political philosophy together with a voluminous bibliography of authors and their writings. ‘At no time does he falter for lack of memory on any subject’, the doctor noted, ‘and tells his own story in a chronologically systematic fashion’.^[13] He was kept under observation and interviewed a number of times in January, and near the end of the month a team of six St Elizabeths doctors conducted a formal examination. They did not find him insane or incompetent. Apart from some rather dramatic pauses, they noted, ‘his stream of talk is clear, coherent and relevant’. Bearing directly upon what the four psychiatrists had told the court there was this:

His ideas and concepts about his economic plan were discussed in some detail. While he still believes that his ideas are good and he still believes in them explicitly and thinks that various countries would be benefited by adopting them, he readily admits that his may not be the only successful economic plan. Nothing in the way of grandiosity or expansiveness beyond this was uncovered and he denied any idea that he was a world saviour.^[14]

One of the doctors would later recall that he had tried ‘to elicit some symptoms of insanity’ but had found none, ‘no delusions, no thought disorder’. In his opinion Pound ‘definitely did not seem to be insane’. Dr Overholser, when these findings were reported to him, ‘suggested a longer period of observation before a final decision is reached’. (Torrey 203-4) He would warn Cornell that many of the doctors on his staff thought Pound was fit to stand trial, but that he would not mention this unless the prosecution questioned him about their views.

In the morning of February 7 Dr Muncie and the other three psychiatrists met at St Elizabeths to examine Pound once again in preparation for the court hearing scheduled for the 13th. That afternoon Pound would tell Charles Olson, ‘Four medicos at me this morning’. He was ‘in bad condition’, according to Olson, ‘his eyes worried and muddy, his flesh puffy and old’, and ‘He kept rubbing his head upward with his hands. Wrought up until it would squeeze your heart of blood.’^[15] These are Dr Muncie’s notes, apparently written during the examination, except for the last page:

Stupor   today blurred -  after 3 days of working.

(ref. to my bro – he had been abroad, hadn’t he?) 

When see you / as group?   - . . . . 

 

(Head in hands)  I thot I was [coming?]  up , but this AM again is all blurred –

                                          Why doesn’t he bring that Confucius?

              We can’t go outside to talk can we ?  (head in hands)

              Didn’t I ask for 15’ sane conversation?

 

When came here?             Don’t know  /  I was here Xmas

Date today                        Feb. – 5 or 6       (reads papers – but not today)

 

<no push of talk>             My mind, goes up & down –

                                          Sometimes head clear at 4AM & afternoon

                                          Today is buzzy or [--- ing]  / completely muddled

 

              (Expresses concern re publication of his Confucius.

 

I told them they would bust the main spring – if I’m not put out to grass –

 

(Refers to Rorschach – 2nd time – says 1st time  / then later, “I’d seen the damnd things before)

   Where seen before?  Somebody at Gallinger-

 

My head is so damnd funny – it goes – takes so long

 

Deadly fatigue – exhaustion – began about 4yrs ago – can’t get flat enough on bed

Head [         ] – pressure – not the hollow  (vertex)

              Sometimes pressure here  (occiput & neck)

 

Has heard from family – I forget them – goes blank

 

(I ask re constit. -)

              (His answer ends in vagueness & blankness)

              I suggest he’d have difficulty with juries comprehension

||“It’s the loss of faith in my capacity to communicate anything to anybody—”  

 

(Talk re going to see Stalin & prevent war – 

 (How?  - what arguments to Stalin)

Gets off on talk of Gesellite theory – 

                                                        Never got back to question

 

*You [think?] I’m afraid of being shot  isn’t it

The attempt to get hold of my mental coherence . . . . .”

 

Claims his broadcasts were designed to prevent war by the adoption of an economic system.

[Sidelined on both sides]

 

Churchill & Eden in front of those who made the war

 

World order plan rests on Confucius therefore the need to get out his translation <in English> of  Confucius  !

 

Recalls the N. Angell letter – feels the laugh was on N. Angell.

 

(As the interview proceeds, he appears more vehement, voluble, but not much more coherent or understandable)

 

He feels he was double crossed in coming to U.S.  Felt sure [constr. ?]  use was to be made of him by bringing him here.    ?Communists  in Brit. Intellig. Service

Fact he was allowed to do the Confucius in Concentration camp means to him he was to be made use of.

 

(Re trial)  / “I’m not of sound mind but not a maniac – it’s neurasthenia & exhaustion”

 

(& not able to confer with counsel)

 

[The notes in pencil end there. What follows is in ink, and probably written after the examination.]

 

Confabulation re my brother.

              Said he his best pupil!

              Had been abroad !

              Came from family of highest culture in Indiana!

(I had only said previous visit that Fred in Wabash same time he was.  

____________________________________________________

 

Diag:    1) PsPs

              2) Paranoid state.

Summary:

1) Grandiosity

2) Paranoid   fixed ideas

              a) Save Constit.

              b) Confucius as basis of world order

              c) Groups of intellectuals in various nations devoted to him   Japan esp.

              d) Hatred of bureaucrats        /     Roosevelt etc.    bureaucrat

              e) Feeling double-crossed – Brit. Intellig. or communists

3) Vagueness of ideas

              a) Can’t make logical presentation  - compl. difficulty with thinking process.

4) Poor grasp of present situation:

              a) That being brot here to “keep” a/c special information at his disposal

5) Alternating push of ideas & “stupor” & feeling of futility.

6) Complete exhaustion as cause of breakdown – [feeling?] pressure 

    complete emptiness in head – pressure in head alternately

7) Memory not keen -  things come back slowly & fragmentarily & with confabulation

After the interview Dr Overholser entered this note of their unanimous opinion into Pound’s case notes:

Patient was somewhat restless, agitated, stating that he is in a fog. He added that his condition goes up and down but at the present time he feels muddled. He gave vent to numerous delusions of grandeur and persecution. He states, for example, ‘If they had let my news through there would have been no Axis.’ . . . . . He is convinced that he was double-crossed in being brought to this country as a prisoner. He says ‘I have connections in half a dozen countries and nerve centers of intellect.’  He thinks he should have been brought to this country not as a prisoner, but as an advisor to the state department in dealing with Japan and, indeed, the rest of the world.  The whole prosecution, he says, is inspired by the British Secret Service or else Communist groups. The greatest gift he could make to the United States is his translation of ‘Confusius’. The examiners were unanimous in their opinion that fundamentally the patient is suffering from a paranoid condition with a considerable psychotic coloring.^[16]

That in essence is the finding they would present to the court hearing on February 13.

              

It was now up to the court to play its part. Judge Laws first addressed the jury:

Certain representations have been made to the Court that Mr. Pound is not in mental condition such as that he is able to participate with counsel in the trial of a criminal case, and not in position to understand the full nature of the charges against him.

Based upon that showing which has been made to me by psychiatrists, I am going to impanel a jury to pass upon that question.  In the event the jury finds that his mental state is as has been represented to me, then Mr. Pound will not be brought to trial because, under the law, it would not be proper to prosecute him if his mental condition is as has been stated to me. (Cornell 154)

All four psychiatrists were called in turn as witnesses, all four, according to the transcript of the hearing, ‘on behalf of the Defendant’, this in spite of the fact that three were government officials who had been appointed by Judge Laws to act on behalf of the government. There were no witnesses on behalf of the prosecution, none of the Army psychiatrists and none of the St Elizabeths doctors. Under examination by Cornell, and cross-examination by Isaiah Matlack Esq. and Donald Anderson Esq. ‘appearing on behalf of the Department of Justice’, the four testified that Pound’s mental state was indeed as they had previously stated. At the conclusion of their testimony, which had occupied morning and afternoon sessions, Mr Matlack asked Cornell, was he not going to call Pound?  When Cornell replied ‘I don’t think so’, Matlack proposed that he be called as ‘the Court’s witness’, but Judge Laws said, ‘I don’t think so. If we call him he will take two or three hours. I do not think it is necessary. The Court of Appeals says very plainly that you cannot disregard an opinion of the psychiatrists’ (Cornell 212). 

The judge then charged the jury to return their verdict, telling them on the one hand that they were not necessarily bound to accept what they had heard, but on the other that ‘in a case of this type where the Government and the defense representatives have united in a clear and unequivocal view with regard to the situation’, he presumed they would have no difficulty making up their minds (Cornell 215). The jury took just three minutes to agree their verdict that Pound was of unsound mind. 

But what warrant did the judge have for his statement that ‘the Government and the defense representatives have united in a clear and unequivocal view’? There is nothing to that effect in the official transcript of the hearing. But then the government had presented no witnesses and offered no evidence to make the case that Pound was in fact competent to stand trial, and that effectively conceded the defence case by default. And possibly the Justice Department had let the judge know, as it had let Cornell know, that they simply wanted Pound to be definitely and finally committed to St Elizabeths. 

The fact was that, as Albert Deutsch observed, Matlack and Anderson had merely gone through the motions of testing the psychiatrists’ opinions. The nearest approach to a moment of truth came towards the end of Matlack’s cross-examination of Dr Overholser. Overholser admitted that he had read the reports of the psychiatrists who had examined Pound in the D. T. C., but said that their finding was that he was ‘suffering from an anxiety neurosis state’. One of those psychiatrists, Major Weisdorf, had reported a ‘transitory anxiety state’, but he had added that this had cleared up rapidly once Pound was removed from the cage. More to the point, he had found, as had the other two psychiatrists, ‘no evidence of psychosis or neurosis at the present time’.  Matlack did not directly challenge Overholser with what was actually in the reports, but he did do it indirectly. Could the opinion of the army psychiatrists, he asked, ‘have anything to do with the present opinion of the doctors around here?’ Cornell immediately objected to the question – Overholser had warned him that in the opinion of the St Elizabeth doctors Pound was neither insane nor incompetent. Matlack then rephrased his question, ‘I asked you did those doctors find him insane?’ In fact he had not asked that, unless he meant it to be understood that the St Elizabeths doctors had agreed with the army psychiatrists, and the expected answer was, no, they had not found him insane. Overholser replied, ‘They said he was not psychotic’, and Matlack then said, ‘That means he was not insane?’ Overholser was evasive,

W.O.:  They were I think interested in prison facts.

I.M.:     When they said he was not psychotic, that means he was not insane?

W.O.:  That he was not suffering from a major mental disease. That was their impression. How long they saw him, I don’t know, or what their experience was. (Cornell 199)

And Matlack allowed the evasion and did not put to him the main finding of all the psychiatrists who had examined Pound apart from these four. The members of the jury would not have known that highly pertinent information was being kept from them; but Judge Laws must have known at least that the army psychiatrists’ reports had declared Pound sane. 

In his speculations about the hearing Conrad L. Rushing questioned why Judge Laws so readily went along with the psychiatric evidence, and observed that the hearing was ‘perfunctory and unusual for a serious case’. He supposed that Laws would have known that the government was in difficulties over its witnesses to the alleged treasonous broadcasts, and that he would certainly have seen that its prosecutors were making no real effort to contest the psychiatrists’ testimonies. If the prosecution were content to have Pound committed to St Elizabeths, he might well have concluded, then why not let him go there? That way justice would be served.^[17]

Judge Laws had explained to the jury that according to the Laws of the District of Columbia, ‘if the jury shall find the accused to be insane the Court may then bring about a commitment of the defendant to hospitalization, to remain in hospitalization until or unless there comes a time when it is found that he has recovered from his mental difficulties, and in that event he is certified back into the court for trial.’ So Pound was remanded to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane. And, as Dr Overholser had observed, no legal device could be used to set him free so long as the indictment stood against him. 

Later in the day of the hearing Dr Overholser wrote to Dr Muncie to say how much he had enjoyed working with him, and how satisfied he was with the way they had all handled the case—if all such cases ‘were handled so, the reputation of expert testimony would be better than it is!’ As to the jury’s having agreed with them, well, ‘there was no opposition!’ (M/P). 

Cornell had talked of getting Pound freed on bail, but now he advised that the time was not right, there would be such an outcry against it. But when he did file an application for bail in January 1947 he found the Justice Department no longer in a complaisant mood. Having allowed Pound to be committed to St Elizabeths it was now determined to keep him there. Mr Matlack was provided with a brief of twelve closely typed pages of ‘authorities and comments which may be cited in opposition to the Motion for Bail’, and these were condensed into the Government’s submission to the Court. The application was summarily dismissed by Judge Laws. The Justice Department’s long suspected complicity in Cornell’s strategy, a suspicion now confirmed by the Muncie/Pound Papers, had saved it from having to prove its case against Pound in court, and had produced the result which it appears to have seen all along as the best it could hope for. Given the difficulty of securing a conviction, the indefinite incarceration of the accused in an insane asylum could be regarded as a positive outcome.

FOOTNOTES

^[1]  Albert Deutsch, ‘Pound Gets “Unsound Mind” Verdict, Escapes Trial’, P.M. (Feb. 1, 1946) 7.

^[2]  For example see E. Fuller Torrey, ‘The Non-Trial’, in The Roots of Treason. Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeths (London, 1984), 177-218. Conrad L. Rushing, a Superior Court Judge in California—in ‘“Mere Words”: The Trial of Ezra Pound’, Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987) 121-2—observed in response to Torrey’s view, that Dr Overholser would be highly unlikely to engage in such improper professional conduct, primarily because he was ‘an important government employee and director of a mental hospital that had close and direct relationships with the Federal District Court.’ Rushing own inference was that Overholser’s commitment to finding Pound insane ‘had more to do with the attitudes of the judge and the prosecutors’. 

^[3]  Ezra Pound to the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, 4 August 1943, as in Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York, 1968) 64.

^[4]  Ezra Pound, ‘Statement’, 7 May 1945, as in Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (eds.), Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946 (New York, 1999) 67.

^[5]  For the reports of the psychiatrists see Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘More on Pound’s Prison Experience’, American Literature 53.3 (1981) 469-76.

^[6]  Report of Major William Weisdorf, 17 July 1945, as in Kimpel and Eaves 470.

^[7]  Adjutant General War Department to Commanding General Mediterranean, 5 November 1945, copy in UK National Archives, Kew, WO 204/12602, item 45.

^[8]  For Julien Cornell’s own account of the trial, which I am drawing on here, see his The Trial of Ezra Pound. A Documented Acount of the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (London: Faber & Faber, 1967).  For a more detailed account based on a wider range of sources, also drawn on here, see A. David Moody, ‘American Justice’, in Ezra Pound: Poet. III: The Tragic Years 1939-1972 (Oxford, 2015), 167-227.

^[9]  US National Archives, Justice Department Files, Justice Department Office Memorandum, Mr Whearty to Mr McInerney, 6 June 1950.

^[10]  Material drawn from the Muncie/Pound Papers will be indicated thus by (M/P) where it is not otherwise made clear in the text.

^[11]  As reported by Stanley I. Kutler, ‘This Notorious Patient’, Helix (Melbourne) 13-14 (1983) 135-6.

^[12]  Albert Deutsch, ‘Ezra Pound Case Postponed To Permit Fuller Inquiry’, P.M. (January 31, 1946)—from cutting with Pound/Muncie Papers.

^[13]  US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1397a-d, Case No. 68102 / Notes #1-4, 21 December 1945: Dr M. M. Parker.

^[14]  US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1396, Case #58102 | Notes | January 28, 1946.

^[15]  Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound. An Encounter at St Elizabeths  (New York, 1975) 68.

^[16]  US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1397e, Ezra Pound | Case No.58102 | Notes #5 | 7 Feb., 1946: Dr Overholser.

^[17]  See Conrad L. Rushing, ‘“Mere Words”’, Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987) 122, 124-5.

[Reprinted from Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 79-97.]