SOURCE: ELH, Vol. 55, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 505-26.

In the following essay, Dasenbrock chooses the middle section of Ezra Pound's Cantos as the basis to understanding Pound's changing views on Mussolini and Italian fascism during the 1930s. Dasenbrock argues that while Pound believed that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were to be equated politically with Mussolini, he also recognized the polarity of the two early American politicians, and his shift from Jeffersonian ideology to that of Adams, as seen in the Cantos, represents his changing thoughts regarding Mussolini's political doctrine.

Certainly one of the difficulties faced by criticism of Ezra Pound's Cantos has been the sheer difficulty of coming to terms with the constantly changing nature and design of the poem. The initial attempts to define that design proceeded largely in spatial and atemporal terms, describing an unchanging plan Pound presumably began the poem with and then proceeded...