Fascist Poetry

Of late, I have been reading Ezra Pound's poetry. The Library of America has done its usual masterful job in putting together a collection which allows one to read widely in a particular poet. I have never been able to figure out if I like Pound or not. On the one hand, his volume of translations of Chinese poems, Cathay, is one of the best books of poetry ever. On the other hand, the Cantos are a mess. The rest of his poetry lies all along that spectrum. In the last week, I have been perusing a couple of his books.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem (or maybe two) in parts. Its a very mixed bag. It starts off marvelously well--from "II":

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

But, the poems soon descend into Canto-like obscure references--popular with the crossword puzzle crowd, no doubt.

More intriguing is Alfred Venison's Poems, a series by Pound pretending to be an uneducated everyman. An example:

The pomps of butchery, financial power,
Told 'em to die in war, and then to save,
Then cut their saving to the half or lower;
When will this system lie down in its grave?

The pomps of Fleet St., festering year on year,
Hid truth and lied, and lied and hid the facts.
The pimps of Whitehall ever more in fear,
Hid health statistics, dodged the Labour Acts.

All drew their pay, and as the pay grew less,
The money rotten and more rotten yet,
Hid more statistics, more feared to confess
C.3, C.4, 'twere better to forget.

How many weak of mind, how much tuberculosis
Filled the back alleys and the back to back houses.
"The medical report this week discloses..."
"Time for that question!" Front Bench interposes.

Time for that question? and the time is NOW.
Who ate the profits, and who locked 'em in
The unsafe safe, wherein all rots, and no man can say how
What was the nation's, now by Norman's kin
Is one day blown up large, the next, sucked in?

That poem, and the rest in this volume are clever; many of the poems in the volume are redone classics (Half a loaf, half a loaf,/Half a loaf? Um-hum?" begins "The Charge of the Bread Brigade.") But, here is the thing that really intrigues me: if I were to hand these poems to the average Socialist/Communist/Marxist of my acquaintance, they would find nothing in the content to which they would object--the poem's content is all much like that above. But, then ask that same person if they like Fascist Poetry, and they would vehemently assert they are not a fascist. Now, Pound was, if nothing else, a Fascist--and a rather nasty Fascist at that. (He worked for the Italians in broadcasting anti-American propaganda in WWII--he may or may not have been insane when he did that.)

So, what does one do when faced with a poem of solid literary merit and obnoxious political ideals? Is Fascist Poetry (or Marxist Poetry, which is, of course, roughly the same thing), inherently bad? Can one separate literary merit and political intention so easily? Could there be a great poem praising the Holocaust? Then why can there be a great poem praising the underlying ideas which led to the Holocaust? I am not entirely sure how to answer that.