John Kasper and Ezra Pound : Saving the Republic

John Kasper was a militant far-right activist who first came to prominence with his violent campaigns against desegregation in the Civil Rights era. Ezra Pound was the seminal figure in Anglo-American modernist literature and one of the most important poets of the 20th century. This is the first book to comprehensively explore the extensive correspondence - lasting over a decade and numbering hundreds of letters - between the two men.

John Kasper and Ezra Pound examines the mutual influence the two men exerted on each other in Pound's later life: how John Kasper developed from a devotee of Pound's poetry to an active right-wing agitator; how Pound's own ideas about race and American politics developed in his discussions with Kasper and how this informed his later poetry. Shedding a disturbing new light on Ezra Pound's committed engagement with extreme right-wing politics in Civil Rights-era America, this is an essential read for students of 20th-century literature.

“Author of an eponymous biography of Pound (2011) and Money and Modernity (CH, Mar'99, 36-3789)—the latter the best book available on Pound’s economic ideas—Marsh (Muhlenberg College) here demonstrates that John Kasper (an anti-Semitic admirer of Hitler and a segregationist), who has been dismissed by most Pound biographers as a right-wing nut who misunderstood Pound’s work, was actually an astute reader of Pound and worked hard to put Pound’s ideas into political action. Kasper, whose letters to Pound run to 400 pages, was jailed several times for inciting violent opposition to school integration in the 1950s. Pound’s anti-Semitism is well known, but the multiculturalism of his Cantos has obscured the intensity of the racism he learned from Louis Agassiz—a racism focused on the dangers of racial ‘amalgamation’ and the resultant ‘decay’ of racial purity. Marsh shows that Pound endorsed Kasper’s activities and agreed that the civil rights struggle was part of a Jewish/communist conspiracy that had infiltrated the US government. Marsh has made an important addition to Pound scholarship, but he has been poorly served by his editors—the text is marred by too many distracting copy-editing errors. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” - G. Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College, USA, CHOICE

“The book’s erudition and exceptionally detailed index are to be commended, and the argument that literary studies of McCarthyism must include consideration of Pound seems impossible to overlook. This sets Marsh’s work beside important recent work … Marsh’s book not only builds on Pound scholarship but cements the value and rapid development of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series.” - This Year’s Work in English Studies