Profiles in Conspiracy: Ezra Pound

"Considered by his peers one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) also considered himself a major political and economic philosopher and filled his later poetry (and prose) with theories that range from the analytically plausible to the weirdly conspiratorial.

"Pound's Cantos, the longest (824 pages) and most ambitious of all modern poems, sees history as a perpetual battle between individual rights and the schemes of those possessed by avarice and power lust. The battle is seen as political in its early stages (thus, Mons of Jutland, a little-known figure, is praised highly for refusing to get involved in a religious war, saying other people's opinions were not his concern), and the major heroes of the poem are Confucius, Lord Coke (who set permanent limits on the British monarchy), and Thomas Jefferson/John Adams as the dialectical twins out of whom the best American traditions emerged.

"In its later stages, the battle becomes economic, as the greedy and power-mad erect "governments" outside government through international banking, which Pound calls the Age of Usury. Here the heroes are Adams again, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Jackson, an odd collection of Utopian money reformers, and, alas, Benito Mussolini." --Robert Anton Wilson