It is thirty years since Martin Kayman first posed the question “how comes it that we enjoy or value the poetry of a fascist?” Kayman followed up this question in the introductory chapter to The Modernism of Ezra Pound, in which he urges that a “radical synthesis of art and politics” be allowed to display its contradictions and not be subdued by “liberal” readings insisting on their separation. What is foregrounded instead is the “democratization” that would bring them together, beginning with “a critique of our literary pleasure” to seek “the political calamity precisely in the means of production of what is recognized as aesthetic achievement.”Footnote ¹

Alec Marsh rephrases the question more benignly and with a less sophisticated agenda: “how is it that Pound can be both benevolent and bigoted, can be both the learned poet and the avid consumer of crude and patent tracts, forgeries and pseudo-scholarship?” (xv). His preoccupations follow in a not unfamiliar political line (following on from Kayman and taken principally by Tim Redman, Leon Surette, Wendy Stallard Flory, Leonard Doob and Peter Nicholls), but in focussing so specifically on the role of John Kasper and the circle surrounding Pound's imprisonment during the 1950s, we are presented with a much closer portrait of those politics. If Marsh falls short of addressing the “cultural revolution” advocated by Kayman, he does provide us with the most detailed identification that we have of the reactionary field (consulting, in the main, the largely unacknowledged holdings of Kasper's correspondence and allied holdings in the Lilly and Beinecke archives – “some 400 pages” (xi)). This is really a story of Kasper rather than Pound himself: many of Pound's replies have been lost, there is no mention of his broadcasts from Rome radio, and the only sustained account of the poetry is of Canto 105 which, hardly surprisingly, “express[es] Pound's view of the drift of the United States away from republicanism into tyranny – a process culminating in the enforced integration of the South and the destruction of the American way of life that had produced the sacred Constitution” (131), a “heavily coded response to what he considered the judicial usurpations of the Warren Court and renewed ‘northern aggression’ against the south” (126). The neglect of the poetry itself (the real means of production) is a pity because, in this instance, we have a particularly lively and astute discussion of the puns and metaphors that structure the aesthetic enterprise, in particular the “noose/nous” complex (128–30).

The absence of Pound directly encourages a set of assumptions, usually through a tracking of the Poundian understandings of Confucius, Agassiz, Jeffersonian agrarianism, or the customary alliance of anti-Semitism and anticommunism (with the fresh gloss of the anti-desegregation of the schooling system following the Warren Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and a principal thrust of Kasper's activism). Marsh quotes from a letter of 1958 – “the age of deception and treachery came in with Wilson and attained perfection in Roosevelt, continued through Truman and Eisenhower” – glossed as “[i]t need hardly be said that it is just Pound's view. One could trace it without much difficulty through his Cantos” (288); in essence, this is true, but such a “trace” is offered only rarely.

Marsh makes it clear that “Pound and his St. Elizabeths' circle were far from alone in their violent reactions to the Warren Court and their decisions” (90) – the desegregation issues that provide the focus for Kasper's white supremacist ideology – and he provides a detailed network of Pound's “political progeny” that includes the influence of familiar figures (Frobenius and Gourmont, for example) but also those who are less familiar (most notably William Archibald Danning, Robert Furniss, David Horton, General Del Valle, Admiral Crommelin and David Wang). This is often at the purely descriptive level, but, on occasion, with a more analytical thrust (Ovidian metaphysics of light, for example, merge well with Kasper's resistance to what he terms racial “mongrelization” (155)), the case for a “Southern Pound” is well made where the admiration for the “purity” of (non-Judaized) southern black speech emerges as the truest American voice (21–22), and his understanding of Jeffersonian agrarianism is shown to merge into wider right-wing sympathies.

Assumption and description are the prevailing modes here, marked in particular by his noting, but failing to follow through, Burton Hatlen's observation that “the poetry is ideologically closed but formally open” – all that Marsh has to say here is, “It is the open form of the poetry working against the poet's own overt wishes that makes the poem worth reading” (159). The text itself is in need of more careful editing: there are too many typographical errors and infelicities of phrasing, looseness of syntax, a somewhat eccentric citation system, episodic narrative, and a reliance on adjectival and adverbial intensifiers to carry an argument through in place of thorough evaluative critique. These presentation limitations are unfortunate because they undermine the sheer depth and scrupulosity of the archival research that is otherwise abundantly on display, offering the most complete portrayal of Kasper that we have, and, by implication a more nuanced account of Pound's political agenda.