The Route of all Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound

by Meghnad Desai

Economists have usually been terrified of sticking their necks out on literary matters and literary figures have in their turn often despised the whole activity of getting and spending or analysing money.


One great exception was the modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a flamboyant American, who came to England in 1908 after several personal and career snubs in his native land. More than half the 464 pages of Pound’s Selected Prose were, however, taken up by economic argumentation, and his epic Cantos are not short of economic references. The personal slights he had suffered in his home country made him believe that modern finance capitalism had no use for creative artists, and this hostility was deepened by interwar unemployment. It did not take long for him to join the ranks of monetary heretics, those who regarded the role of the monetary system as anything but benign and were called “monetary cranks” by the orthodox.