Volume 23, Number 5 · April 1, 1976
Pound and Fascism
By Donald Davie
Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths
by Charles Olson, edited by Catherine Seelye
Grossman/Viking, 147 pp., $11.95
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile
by C. David Heymann
Viking, 372 pp., $12.50
'Olson saved my life.' Thus Pound in January 1946, in his first days at St. Elizabeths, appealing in terror at the prospect of losing whatever sanity remained to him. How that life was saved we can now know, thanks to Catherine Seelye, who has put the story together, mostly out of Charles Olson's papers at the University of Connecticut. Her tact and scrupulousness are beyond praise, and the book she has made cannot be recommended too urgently—even (perhaps especially) to those who have no special interest in, or liking for, either Charles Olson or Ezra Pound. What to do in a democratic society with the errant or aberrant citizen of genius—this question, fumbled at or glossed over by everyone who has written on Pound's case (jurists and psychiatrists as well as biographers and critics), is here posed more starkly, and explored more searchingly, than ever before. We might have guessed that Olson would do it, if anyone could….
Review, 2536 words
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