The Poet (Ezra Pound)

The poet (Ezra Pound).



They came for the poet with a pen,
And a signature upon a form,
And a term that sealed his fate,
Mad, they called him for his words.

But the poet wasn’t mad, he was saner,
Than any of the politicians,
With their maps and machines,
And their poisonous dreams,
That saw war as sane and reasonable.

They could see it in his eyes,
Only truth and no lies,
So they put him in a cage,
For twenty five days,
Until the poetry became pain,
And the light within dimmed,
In the ruins of European civilisation.









http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound


Pound remained in Italy, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. He made several radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his scant political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. When Pound spoke on Italian radio, he gave a series of talks on political and cultural matters, art and patronage and economic theories. Pound believed that economics was the core issue for the cause of World War II. Specifically, his talks were largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the war.


Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels (the national debt indeed rose astronomically because of the wars). He advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He favored government issued currency[20] with no interest to pay, preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764.[citation needed] Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of Thomas Jefferson, as well as with Benjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.