The Seeker

"I have not found thee in the tents

In the broken darkness.

I have not found thee at the wellhead

Among the women with pitchers. . . ."

When the author of these lines, Ezra Pound, came bounding out of Idaho in 1900, he brought along one of the world's remarkable egos. He also brought a poetic flame, the divining eye of a natural teacher, and a motley personality--part despot, part poet, part pressagent. Clearly, he was in for an interesting time.

At 22, Pound forsook his country: the U.S. would not leave off rustling its bank notes to listen to him. The separation was final. London listened more attentively. There Pound began to publish his opaque, lapidary, brilliantly polished poems. Some of the literati began to call him the master verse maker of his generation.

Cape, Strut & Whiskers. Then came Paris. The Idahoan with the glittering eye and the positive manner ranged magnificently from salon to bordello, flaunting his cape and stick and Byronic collars, spitting critical fire, pinching the ladies and wagging his fierce red whiskers. He grew as famous as his neighbors, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. By the time he was 40 he had written 31 books. The stream of poetry, prose and French and Chinese translations swelled to a torrent. Then, the early '30s, Ezra Pound stepped abruptly out of his field.

Fascismo. From a frowzy palazzo in Rapallo, Italy, he began sending out ranting political letters dated by the Fascist calendar. Friends found him extolling the "order" Mussolini had brought, prophesying wonders for Fascism, and grunting over the mysteries of politics and Social Credit.

War gave Pound the international voice his poetry had failed to give him. On the Rome radio, he used it to heap contumely on the Jews, to lecture and vilify his native land. After the U.S. entered the war, he kept it up. On July 26, 1943, he became one of the few U.S. citizens ever to be indicted for treason.

Last week, the reluctant native, Ezra Pound, 60, was home to stay. The positive manner was gone with the cape and stick; his eyes were rheumy, his beard wilted. His lawyer in the capital's U.S. District Court, where he stood indicted on 19 counts of treason, said senility had made him unfit for trial, and asked that he be placed under psychiatric observation.

Police reporters sought him out as they never had before. A few scholars and fellow poets saw in his case the ancient problem of the artist v. society. Jurists, who anticipated the most sensational case of its kind since the trial of Aaron Burr, wondered just how the U.S. proposed to convict its disaffected poet.

Voice of Confusion. The ragbaggy old darling of the U.S.'s expatriate intelligentsia did not seem to care very much. Lolling in the infirmary of the D.C. jail, he denied that he had ever talked treason: "I was only trying to tell the people of Europe and America how they could avoid war by learning the facts about money." He spoke ruefully: "It's all very well to die for an idea, but to die for an idea that you can't remember. . . ." He struck a conspiratorial tone: "I took Mussolini an economic theory that would have blown the roof off Europe."

But most of the time he just sat, wrapped in his grey flannel bathrobe and his artistic and political frustrations. The tents were still empty of whatever it was he had sought.

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