Separating the Art from the Artist: Does Ezra Pound’s Work Deserve an Academic Platform? Oscar Williams College

T.S. Eliot once declared Ezra Pound to be “more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than any other individual” (“Ezra Pound”). Nevertheless, in the modern era Pound’s associations with antisemitism and fascism “determines not just how his poetry is read but, in many cases, whether it is read” (Flory 285). Leon Surette notes that while “his pivotal position in the history of literary modernism … has made it impossible to simply expunge him from literary history” critics have instead “engaged in damage control, expelling Pound from his allegedly important role … despite good evidence to the contrary” (609). Therefore, his work now exists in ambiguous academic space wherein the narrative of his life overshadows his importance to literature. However, this existence is problematic because it presupposes that there can be no separation between a poet’s ideologies and their work. Instead, Pound’s work deserves to be evaluated through a historical as well as ethical lens, and because of his importance to modernism, his work should not be censored from the classroom.

Connotations now associated with the term fascism tend to obscure the nuances of Pound’s politics. George Orwell notes that since the war “the word...