This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound

This review is about the book, "This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound" by Eusatace Mullins. Although this book was published in 1961, it has a 1940s style: tart, arcane, well-researched, gossipy but high-brow all the same, coupled with a strong impulse toward ethical puritanism. The first third of the book is what you might expect from any study of great literary figures of the glorious past, particularly that Bohemian period of the Twenties and Thirties in Paris. There is an abundant crowd of literary luminaries that Ezra Pound meets and helps. There are literary quotations as well as quoted passages by other writers either about Ezra Pound or the time-period in which he and his friends lived. There is no literary analysis or explanation for any of Pound's poems or other works here or elsewhere in the book. The main names here, however, are William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot as well as Ford Maddox Ford and Wyndham Lewis. The middle-third of the book is largely political, involving the story of how Ezra Pound felt compelled to speak out on the radio about the evils of war and how Americans ought to resist entering into World War II as well as critical remarks about President Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thus causing the U.S. government suddenly to take the totalitarian decision to label Ezra Pound's talks as acts of treason. Ezra Pound spent six months in a concentration camp in Pisa, Italy and then -- illegally and unconstitutionally -- thirteen (13!) years in confinement at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, D.C. The last third of the book is a political and spiritual validation, vindication and defense of Ezra Pound's ideas about constitutional government, communication, and writing, although it is clear that after Ezra and Dorothy Pound leave St. Elizabeth's Hospital and leave the country to return to Italy, Pound never again communicates with the author (or anyone else in America, for that matter) and so has no knowledge of the last two decades of his life (with and without Dorothy Pound and Olga Rudge). The author does a fine if unnecessary job of explaining just who Ezra Pound's (few) true friends were and who his (many) enemies were, naming names on both sides, without fully explaining why Eza Pound, who helped so many become good and famous poets, writers, artists, was not reciprocated with favor and help in return by them in his dire moment of need except to say that these saw this genius, this creator, as "this difficult man." Never once did the author think or even suggest that with each successive world war, civilization was growing more and more anti-intellectual, little capable of tolerating let alone understanding a man who loved learning, who could think, a man who kept growing intellectually even as he reached into his seventies, seeking the new intellectually in order to try to make the new stay new. There are references in this work a

Eustace Mullins biography of and recollections of his friendship with the world reknowned poet Ezra Pound. Pound was also political prisoner who was arrested by the US government for making "pro-fascist" radio broadcasts during ww2. They knew the charges wouldn't stick in a court so they had him commited to a mental hospital where he was imprisoned for years.