(2 of 3)
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living,
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.
Il Miglior Fabbro. Doing well in verse for himself never deflected Pound from doing good for the verse of others. It seems incredible now, but Pound had to nag Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, for half a year before she would print T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prujrock. For Eliot, Pound also undertook the most consequential task of editing in 20th century poetry: he cut The Waste Land in half. Eliot, who dedicated it to Pound with the words il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman), has written : "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue penciling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius."
In the mid-20s when Eliot was on the verge of a second breakdown and still clerking in a bank, Pound was so infuriated by his friend's lot that he tried to rally 30 people who would donate $50 each to help support a proven artist for one year, beginning with Eliot. Pound put up the first $50 himself. To appreciate the selflessness of the gesture at the time, one had only to enter Pound's stark Parisian flat. There, Dorothy Shakespear Pound, an English girl Ezra had married in 1914, served tea on a wooden packing case, and guests sat on chairs Pound had built. A solitary spoon passed from hand to hand.
The Silly Samaritan. The good Samaritan became the silly Samaritan in the Depression '305. An increasingly unstable Ezra ranted about usury and Jewish bankers and murkily expounded Social Credit, whose chief feature was printing currency backed by goods rather than gold. His infatuation with Mussolini is hard to ex plain, except that Pound shared something of the Duce's peacock strut. They met only once, in 1933, and Mussolini told Pound that he found his Cantos amusing. Old Ez launched into some crackpot scheme for growing Brazil nuts, the Duce frowned, and a flunky brought the great confrontation to an abrupt end. The rest became the tawdry story of Pound's anti-U.S. wartime radio diatribes from Rome, the abortive U.S. treason charges against him, and his confinement as a mental case, of sorts, in Washington's St. Elizabeths Hospital, from which he was freed in 1958 to return to Italy.