John Adams through Pound’s lens

Among the nation’s Founding Fathers, John Adams is one of those least likely to be called an icon. No 50-dollar bill or 10-dollar bill, no quarter or nickel now bears his visage. Despite the popular work of historian David McCullough, ensuing national attention, and an increase in visitors to the Adams homestead in Quincy, he lags in a sweepstakes of  icons dominated by Franklin, Washington and Jefferson, and, recently, even Hamilton.

Adams was an icon to someone, however – Ezra Pound, one of the chief players in the Twentieth Century literary scene. The odd expatriate Pound wrote deeply on Adams. His noted and controversial ‘Cantos’ include several that focus on John Adams.

As he composed the key parts of his epic poem in the 1930s, Idaho-born Pound built his own pantheon of civilization builders. These included Napoleon, Jefferson and Adams. As followers of literary history and veterans of the World War II era may know, Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini was also part of Pound’s pantheon.

A spiteful series of pro-Fascist radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II led to charges after the war that Pound was a traitor. Pound was also an anti-Semite, and while there were other notable American literary leaders of his era who shared his anti-Semitism, none were as dark, lurid, bitter and public.  With friends like legend-maker Ezra Pound, John Adams’s myth did not need enemies.

Everybody thinks about money. But no major poet has written as much on the theme of money than Pound. Maybe it was because his father had been employed at the Mint. Pound claimed that the Epic poem – and the ‘Cantos’ is an epic – was required to include history, and that understanding economics was necessary to understanding history.  America, as a debtor nation was abhorrent to Ezra. He took his economic cues from Social Credit proponent Major Clifford Douglas, whose theories found followers in Canadian politics over the mid-20^th Century.

Ezra Pound discovered support in John Adams’ writings for his hard-held view that debt was dangerous. Adams wrote that Americans’ distress derived from ignorance of the nature of  “coin, credit, and circulation.”  He did not have high post for banks or stock markets, quite unlike Hamilton, if not Jefferson. In his poems, Pound quoted, in strange juxtapositions, bits from the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson.

“The revolution,” said Mr. Adams,

“Took place in the minds of the people.”

- From Cantos XXXII.

Pound nurtured a school of poetry described as Imagistic. He took some of that style from ancient Chinese poetry, of which he was a dedicated student. But, in parts of the “Cantos” his demonized economics take very black turns.

The poetry –obtuse and vexing – spilled into his manner of talking, and a long stay in a Washington D. C. mental ward became his post war lot, rather than a trial, and possible execution, for his Italian radio propaganda.

Debt and deficits of course, still cloud national debate today. Adams’ ability to stand outside the machinery of “iconizing’ is seen as something of plus in some quarters. In the annals, the encounter of the patriot Adams and expatriate Pound makes an offbeat footnote.

Last update: 6/3/2004; 4:47:01 PM.