SOURCE: Ellmann, Maud. “The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.” In Between “Race” and Culture, edited by Bryan Cheyette, pp. 84-101. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ellmann identifies elements of their stance toward Jews in the works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, concluding that the two poets “projected their own darkness” upon them.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. 

—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, tend to be coupled in literary history and hence to be regarded as accomplices. There are many similarities between them: both rejected the “huge looseness” of the United States, together with its liberal individualism, and fled to Europe in pursuit of pastures old. Both adopted a radical conservatism which, in Pound's case, led to fascism; yet both wrote poetry whose experimentalism poses a puzzling contrast...