[Swprograms] BBC Radio 3: The Trial of Ezra Pound

[Mike Barraclough <softbulletin1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Marks sent me details of this programme highlighted on the Radio Studies list, the broadcasts referred to were on shortwave:

BBC RADIO 3 PROMOTION NOTE
Sunday 20th July, 21.30 BST (UTC + 1)
The Trial of Ezra Pound

During the Second World War Ezra Pound, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, a founder of modernism, a writer hailed by T. S. Eliot as ‘the greater master’, made a series of radio broadcasts in Italy criticising American imperialism and involvement in the conflict. They were vituperative, anti-Semitic – and somewhat tedious.

When the war came to an end Pound, who was then 60, was incarcerated in a small cage in Pisa, open to the heat and dust and under the glare of floodlights at night. Then he was flown home to stand trial. His broadcasts, the prosecution in Washington alleged, gave ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’ and thus he had committed treason. This, though, was never actually brought to trial. Pound, was judged unfit to stand trial and consigned to St Elizabeths Hospital, where he spent almost 13 years.

He was well enough to complete the ‘Pisan Cantos’ which he had begun on scraps of paper in the ‘gorilla pen’. In 1949 they won the Bollingen-Library of Congress Prize, for the best poetry by an Amercan citizen published during the previous year.  This caused outrage.

Eventually, after intervention on his behalf by major writers including T. S. Eliot, Hemingway and, rather reluctantly, Robert Frost, Pound was released. He returned to Italy and lived there until his death in 1972.

In 'The Trial of Ezra Pound ' the poet and historian Sean Street (Bournemouth University) investigates the case and its significance today. Did Pound commit treason or inconveniently use his right to free speech? He considers whether there are contemporary parallels – the incarcaration by the state without due legal process of those it wishes out of the way.

Pound’s thinking was tainted by anti-Semitism, but have not some of his economic ideas have been proved true? Was he insane, and did he commit treason? Street Listens to Pound himself, his broadcasts, explanations of his thinking, and poems recorded on his his release. In a rare interview, Street also speaks to Pound's daughter, Mary de Rachewlitz, his biographer David Moody, to Helen Dennis who has edited essays on his work, and the playwright Bernard Kops who, though Jewish, wrote a play about Pound in his cage, to find out how we should respond to this great, terrible, complex, naïve, wise and foolish man, whose achievement as a poet was revolutionary and colossal.  

BBC Radio 3 Live/Listen Again:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/

I googled using "Ezra Pound" shortwave radio broadcasts and a lot of hits came up including:

US National Archives, paragraphs I26 to I31, the Foreign Broadcast Information Broadcast Service recorded Pound's broadcasts:
http://www.archives.gov/publications/ref-info-papers/70/introduction.html

Transcript of two broadcasts:
http://www.gnosticliberationfront.com/what_did_ezra_pound_really_say.htm

After decades of silence, Pound explains why he had to go on Shortwave Radio from Italy and speak his mind before war broke out in Europe. He felt it was the only thing an American could do to stop the war.
7 minute ogg file, I used Winamp to play it, scroll to 16, lots of conspiracy theory etc audio files in this list!:
http://www.simmeringfrogs.com/ogg/index.html

Now I first became aware of Ezra Pound when I was 14 from the lyrics of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row :)

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

Mike

 


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