Apologia for Mussolini

Ezra Pound felt that artists should command central roles in society and were prospectively, as well as historically, the most selfless and humane of citizens. No other social element exceeded the artist for perceiving beauty, enhancing empathy, or grasping the vital over sordid materialism. Advancement of the aesthetic, honest, and just constituted the human vocation. None was better suited to this cause than the artist, the true “scientist” of the soul. The inherent flimsiness of such romantic propositions eluded Pound, enthralled to the Duce, whom he took as a species of artist endowed with a rare gift. Pound remained uncomprehending of Mussolini’s Italy, from tawdry spectacle to Fascism’s convulsed end. Lost on Pound was a stubborn fact: Art at times has expressed the best of sensibility but has never stalled the worst. Pound’s loss of mental focus placed him with a duped multitude. Invoking the poet as patron spirit, in the early twenty-first century an Italian neo-fascist organization -CasaPound – re-harnessed his name to xenophobia and malice.