Pound's Prize

Where does art end and morality begin? Or are they inseparable? That debate has gone on, to no satisfactory conclusion, since the days of the Greek theater. Lately it has focused most prominently on America's most prominent poet-in-exile, Ezra Pound. Now 86, Pound was indisputably a profound influence on 20th century poets, among them Yeats, Eliot and Frost. Yet he was also a thoroughgoing Fascist during the '30s and early '40s, pro-German and antiSemitic, a broadcaster of propaganda for Mussolini. At the end of World War II, he was arrested by the American Army and incarcerated in a Washington insane asylum as mentally unfit to stand trial for treason. He was released in 1958. Last May, Pound was nominated for the $2,000 Emerson-Thoreau Medal by the literary commit tee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The nomination was rejected by a vote of the governing council. The academy president, Physics Professor Harvey Brooks of Harvard, wrote a confidential letter to certain members pointing out that many of their peers had suggested that memories of the war were still so sharp that they could not consider Pound suitable for an award with humanitarian overtones. The majority, said Brooks, "regarded the award as honoring a person for his whole life rather than for his literary accomplishment alone."

But other members disagreed, and at least three have resigned from the society. M.I.T. Biologist Jerome Y. Lettvin complained bitterly: "You decided not to award him because you disap proved of the man but not his poetry. I will have no part of it." Pound wrote in Canto LXXXIII.

The States have passed thru a Dam'd supercilious era Down, Derry-down/ Oh let an old man rest.

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