Pound and Economics: The Beginnings

Abstract

Pound’s economics is largely based on his poetic notion of “usura” surfacing for the first time in the war sections of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and based on C. H. Douglas’s unorthodox underconsumptionist theory of Social Credit. Since Pound is not an economist but a poet, in order to understand the way in which economics permeates his poetry and essays one should bear in mind that Pound’s utopian crusade against financiers is closely tied to his avant-garde efforts to create a new poetic language. In this essay I will briefly survey four stages decisively shaping his early economic ‘education’: first, his London experiences in the radical magazine The New Age with its strong Ruskinian allegiances; secondly, his own American agrarian background which consciously or unconsciously and in various hues, stayed with him his whole life; thirdly, his editing Eliot’s The Waste Land along with the idea of art as handicraft; finally I will examine one of the Hell Cantos where the financiers’ corrupting economics merges with the corruption of language.