In the Salon of writers who whine about the alleged censorship they have suffered, about the alleged dangers to freedom, it is worth taking a trip to theOval, at stand U29, at the Ares publishing housefor a volume that is a little jewel: “Ezra Pound in Pisa. A poet in a cage” by Luca Gallesi. A story worth rediscovering.
Ezra Pound would have liked to be for the young United States, but already forgetful of the founding fathers, what Dante was for Italy which still had to be a nation and above all a people. The poetic inspiration came from the Divine Comedy, from its eschatology with the verses that abandon the cultured Latin language to embrace the vernacular of the people, to be understandable to all.
In a West that was already devoted to business and the divinities of money and the market, as Alessandro Gnocchi claims in Il Giornale, Pound supported the importance of the figure of the poet as an “economist”. He firmly believed that money and the banking system should maintain the purpose for which they were created: to support enterprise, trade and development, pursuing social justice. However, Pound found himself having to confront his ideal of himself with a reality in which banks seemed to have abandoned their original purpose, venturing into creative finance practices distant from the real economy.
It seems like a very current scenario, with the catastrophic crises we have witnessed, with the adventures, the bailouts, the billions that have passed and vanished and reappeared, like a global Monopoly. And in this Monopoly, even the intervention of a country in war can be motivated by economic reasons. This is what Ezra Pound thought about US intervention in World War II. He supported it on Italian radio, in the midst of fascism. Thus, in 1945, he was arrested and imprisoned as a traitor in an iron cage in the US prison camp in Pisa.
A cage exposed to the sun, to the rain, to the mockery of the jailers. Yet, Pound found the strength to fight imaginary boxing matches, walking relentlessly around the perimeter of his cage. And at night he composed: eleven poems, what would become the Canti Pisani. Which Luca Gallesi, a recognized Pound scholar, carefully analyzes in one of the sections of the book.
After the cage, the doors of a mental hospital in the USA opened for Pound, where he remained for thirteen years. Then, once free, he returned to the Italy he loved, to die in Venice in 1972.
