Ezra Pound‘s Birthday today – this now highly-problematic figure (at the same time undeniable modernist hero). We refer you to Tom Rea‘s illuminating 2022 essay, “Reading Ezra Pound in the Neo-Fascist Age of Trump”
“Fuck biography,” said an old friend of our daughter’s when visiting her and us in Casper last year. We’d been talking about that old, old question of whether, when you learn of a poet’s meannesses and failings it should change how you read the poem. “The art’s what’s important,” she said. “The art needs to stand on its own.” Does it? I wondered.”
and his (reluctant) conclusion:
We talk about fringe ideas, but we forget that even fringe ideas have consequences. Before learning of CasaPound (sic), I could leave the old man’s politics in the dust and not think more about it. January 6 raised that zombie corpse up out of the dirt again in American politics, waving its bloody rags. Fascism likes to appear to be on the march when in fact it’s on the creep – and harder to see. Our job is to make sure we don’t allow Pound’s great poetry to obscure our sight.”
2022 – clearly the piece requires (regrettably) a 2025 update – Fascism undeniably marching not creeping! – and CasaPound, far from declining from its position and visibility in Italian politics, continuing controversial continuing intolerant, (the government of Giorgia Meloni seemingly disturbingly tolerating, even facilitating its far-right-wing views)
A spotlight on two influential women in his life, his lifelong companion (they first met in Paris in 1923), the gifted concert violinist of international repute, Olga Rudge, and their daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, Italian-American poet and translator.
Allen first met Olga (along with Pound) in Rapallo and Venice in 1967, as he notes above.
Pound dedicated the final stanza of his epic The Cantos to her, in homage and gratitude for her courageous and loyal support of him. During the last eleven years of his life, she was his devoted companion, secretary, and nurse (she had been that on and off from the very beginning). She survived him by twenty-four years, remaining in the small house in Venice that they had shared together. Failing health eventually forced her to leave and spend her final days with her daughter, Mary, at Brunnenburg Castle. She died in 1996, a month before her 101st birthday and is buried next to Pound in beloved Venice – in Venice’s Isola di San Michele cemetery.
Mary de Rachewiltz born 1925, though raised in Italy by foster parents, frequently visited her father as a child. She married the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz in 1946—the same year her father was deported to the U.S. to stand trial for treason. In 1971 her autobiography, Discretions, was published.
From the publisher’s notes:
“Ezra Pound’s daughter movingly reveals is a side of the poet which is seldom touched upon, that of devoted father, and at the same time serves to illuminate many of the more difficult, personal passages of The Cantos. But the book is more than a mere memoir, for Mary de Rachewiltz is an accomplished poet and translator in her own right, guided in her craft under her father’s tutelage: through her stylized, often oblique prose technique we are enabled to appreciate more deeply Pound’s inner anguish during the war years and the strains put upon him by the circumstances of his life..”
Robert Fitzgerald, the great poet, critic, and classical translator, writes:
“This story by Ezra Pound’s daughter adds to all other testimony something indispensable for a just understanding of his life and work; it is also in its own right a work of literature, a record of great human difficulties and great devotion.”
de Rachewiltz is also the author of several books of poems in Italian and English and has translated several of her father’s works including The Cantos. She remained at Brunnenburg Castle, following her husband’s death (one year after Olga’s, in 1977). She served for years as curator of the Ezra Pound Archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale University,
See Mary discussing her father (en français) with the poet Adonis – here
Hear Mary reading from her father’s work
This past July, she celebrated her 100th birthday.
A counterpoint offered today on the 140th anniversary of the birth of Pound – John Gery –
https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2025/10/30/the-return-of-ezra-pound-on-his-140th-birthday/
“Those who choose to read him no longer feel compelled to castigate him nor to redeem him from his lapses in conscience. His costly shortcomings have been well-documented. Rather, the time has come to acknowledge Pound’s return to literature in an age when writers are struggling to define themselves in the hyper-digitalized, corporate, violent, and often stagnant present”