We're starting this week off with a timely historic curio: a new PennSound page for Ezra Pound's radio speeches, curated by Ben Friedlander and Richard Sieburth. In total, there are three speeches from 1942, which were recorded by the US government — "Power" from February 19th, "The Pattern" from March 30th, and "With Phantoms" from May 18th — along with two undated speeches on E. E. Cummings, which are presented in both full and abridged formats.
In conjunction with these recordings, we've gathered a few pertinent resources, including texts by Friedlander and Sieburth on Pound's radio broadcasts, and the complete text of Pound's radio speeches via Leonard W. Doob's book, Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II. In his introduction to that volume, Doob observes that "Reproducing Pound's admittedly controversial speeches over 30 years later requires justification." "Why publish this volume?" he asks. Here's what he offers by way of justification:
Pound wrote these scripts; they are part of his legacy. He is so important in American and British literature of the twentieth century that whatever he wrote cannot be ignored. The speeches, more over, are valuable from a historical standpoint: they reveal what one man, broadcasting from an enemy radio station during World War II, believed his countrymen should hear. On the basis of what he said, moreover, Pound was arrested and accused of treason; he spent 13 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital (a government institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.) as a result. Anyone who seeks to understand Pound or to write about him and his times cannot overlook these speeches. Although Pound's reputation will forever rest on his poetry and other writings, and not upon these scripts, the broadcasts are part of his record. Actually, the speeches should be of interest of Poundians not only because, according to Mary de Rachewiltz, they reflect his earlier writings but also because they affected his subsequent poetry.
You can listen in and read more here, and don't forget to visit PennSound's main Ezra Pound author page, where you'll find an extensive archive of recordings organized by Sieburth, which spans from 1939–1972, along with innumerable supplemental materials.
