Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Pound in Purgatory overturns all previous explanations of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism by uncovering its roots in economic and conspiracy theory. Leon Surette demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, Pound was not a life-long anti-Semite and consistently ignored or resisted anti-Semitic comments from his correspondents until after 1931. From 1931 to 1945 Pound's poetry took a back seat to his activities as an economic reformer and propagandist for the corporate state. Pound believed he had a simple and practical solution for the economic woes of the world brought on by the Great Depression, and he became increasingly preoccupied with capturing political power for the economic reform he envisioned. As the world spiraled toward war, Pound's program of economic reform foundered and he gradually succumbed to a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Through an incisive analysis of Pound's correspondence and writings, much of it previously unexamined, Surette shows how this belief fostered the virulent anti-Semitism that pervades his work--both poetry and prose--from this time forward.

Language: English

Pages: 328

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Release: May 19, 1999

ISBN: 0252024982

ISBN 13: 9780252024986

Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Pound in Purgatory overturns all previous explanations of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism by uncovering its roots in economic and conspiracy theory. Leon Surette demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, Pound was not a life-long anti-Semite and consistently ignored or resisted anti-Semitic comments from his correspondents until after 1931. From 1931 to 1945 Pound's poetry took a back seat to his activities as an economic reformer and propagandist for the corporate state. Pound believed he had a simple and practical solution for the economic woes of the world brought on by the Great Depression, and he became increasingly preoccupied with capturing political power for the economic reform he envisioned. As the world spiraled toward war, Pound's program of economic reform foundered and he gradually succumbed to a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Through an incisive analysis of Pound's correspondence and writings, much of it previously unexamined, Surette shows how this belief fostered the virulent anti-Semitism that pervades his work--both poetry and prose--from this time forward.

Language: English

Pages: 328

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Release: May 19, 1999

ISBN: 0252024982

ISBN 13: 9780252024986

More books from Leon Surette

The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics

Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson

A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos

2.5/5 ( ratings)

The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism

The End of Truth and the Rise of Literary Criticism

Art in the Age of the Machine

Rate this book!

Write a review?