SOURCE: "Ezra Pound and the Politics of Patronage," in American Literature, Vol. 63, No. 1, March, 1991, pp. 26-42.

In the following essay, Wolfe examines contradictory aspects of Pound's democratic and elitist sentiments, particularly concerning the relationship between art and economics. Wolfe contends that "Pound's literary ideology has at least as much in common with Ralph Waldo Emerson's individualism as it does with Benito Mussolini's fascism."

Few writers, modern or otherwise, have inspired more criticism, and more of it theoretically polarized and mutually hostile, than Ezra Pound. The critic who would engage Pound's work finds himself or herself framed from the outset by a kind of critical Cold War, one which forces him into something resembling the role of Marc Antony at the funeral in Julius Caesar. Pound critics come time and again either to bury or to praise this strange and disturbing individual, who is seen by turns either as...