John Dunn

Pound analysis

The following quotations by Ezra Pound were taken from my book Renaissance: Counter-Renaissance.

Why were they included there in the first place?

The answer for me is straightforward.

It is accepted that Ezra Pound was one of the greatest influences on the literature of the English speaking peoples in the twentieth century. He brought his influence to bear both through his own poetry and the mentoring support that he provided to other writers, perhaps most famously to T. S. Eliot.

However, Pound’s prose works were amongst some of the most insightful analyses of twentieth century global geopolitics, cutting to the core of what is the real block to mankind's struggle upward out of ignorance. This would have been reason enough.

Thus the Commedia is, in the literal sense, a description of Dante's vision of a journey through the realms inhabited by the spirits of men after death; in a further sense it is the journey of Dante's intelligence through the states of mind wherein dwell all sorts and conditions of men before death; beyond this, Dante or Dante's intelligence may come to mean ‘Everyman’ or ‘Mankind,’ whereat his journey becomes a symbol of mankind's struggle upward out of ignorance...

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance.

Jehovah is a semitic cuckoo’s egg laid in the European nest. He has no connection with Dante’s god. That later conception of supreme Love and Intelligence is certainly not derived from the Old Testament.

Ezra Pound, Mang Tsze.

...and we have not realised to what an extent a renaissance is a thing made — a thing made by conscious propaganda.

Ezra Pound, The Renaissance.

The Bible was invented as a substitute-priest. The Canonical prohibition against usury disappeared. Polite society did not consider usury as Dante did, that is, damned to the same circle of Hell as the sodomites, both acting against the potential abundance of nature.

Ezra Pound, An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States