China and the West

Ezra Pound 1945.
1976
Monika Motsch : Nach dem Einmarsch der amerikanischen Truppen wird Ezra Pound festgenommen und im Straflager von Pisa als Landesverräter mit Androhung der Todesstrafe, interniert. Er schreibt in dieser Zeit seine Pisan Cantos, The great digest und The unwobbling pivot.
1997
Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pounds was arrested in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason against the United States, imprisoned for six months in the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, transported to the District of Columbia, where he was judged mentally unfit to stand trial, and incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill. He began to show signs of an imminent nervous breakdown. His profound hopes for a Confucian reformation of Western government and culture has dissolved as a result of the events of the previous two years : the fall of Mussolini from power in July 1943, the gradual crumbling of Fascist government in Italy and the comprehensive victory of the Allies in Europe.
2003
Wendy Stallard Flory : By 1945, Pound's reliance on the writings of Confucius had become indispensable to him. In the months before his arrest and during his time in the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa, Confucius became the key reference point for Pound's conception of himself as public activist and private individual, not only intellectually, but, in an even more influential way, psychologically. Pound's Confucius has taken on a strong and intimate symbolic significance as an intrinsic dimension of his own psychological self-conceptualizing. To understand the workings of Pound's mind during his time at Pisa it is essential to have the clearest possible sense of the nature of his Confucianism – and vice versa. Pound has so thoroughly internalized his own 'idea' of Confucius that he thought of himself in terms of Confucius and Confucius in terms of himself. By the time htat he was imprisoned, his intense focus upon and commitment to the value of Confucius's writings had become the indispensable stabilizing influence that enabled him to keep some measure of control over the angry and manic moods that had become increasingly unmanageable as Mussolini dragged Italy ever more deeply into war. Under the extreme stresses of his imprisonment and in the absence of any other help, Pound's faith in the reliability of Confucius's reiterations of the possibilities of mental equilibrium under adversity was his one 'stay against confusion', a defense against even more serious mental disorder.
Father Aloysius H. Vath (1909-1992, Chaplain in the US Army, R.C. chaplain in the Pisan cantos) gave Pound the Catholic prayer book for army and navy, ed. by John J. Burke, New York : Paulist Press, 1917. Vath said : "Pound seemed to be very Confucius-minded. He was very interested in Confession, in the Catholic act of contrition, act of sorrow, that was in his [field prayer book]." Pound is developing his larger point, about the compatibility of Confucianism and Catholicism, by noting the importance of the discipline of self-examination in both. By referring to the 'spirits of the parents as intercessors', Pound seems to be trying to anticipate the inevitable objection that the Chinese tradition of ancestor-worship is unreconcilable with Catholic belief and practice. Pound's next emphasis is Catholic missionary activity in China, and he suggests the strategy of incorporating in a Chinese version of the Catholic prayer book Chinese characters that have particular Confucian significance. He suggests that, by teaching the Confucian classics with their focus on 'equity', Catholic priests would be able to attract Protestants to convert to Catholicism. He quotes Mengzi to support the idea that there is nothing to prevent a pope from being an ideal world-ruler in the mold of the ancient Chinese emperors of legendary virtue.
Pound has included 'ideograms of Confucian school' in his prayer book. These marginal ideograms are very revealing of Pound's thinking at this time, especially when they are seen in conjunction with the Confucian passages in the Pisan cantos, with Pound's own translations of the Confucian classics.
On a photograph in the Counter Intelligence Corps Headquarters in Genoa he is shown working from the James Legge edition of the Confucian classics, that he had brought with him from Rapallo. The Chinese characters that Pound has written in the margins of his Catholic prayer book provide traces of an immersion in the Chinese of the Confucian texts that, given Pound's precarious mental state at that time, would have been, psychologically, 'lifesaving'. Mathew's Chinese-English dictionary in the revised edition that Pound owned when he was in St Elizabeths. Where Legge organizes his glossary according to the radicals of the characters, Mathews organizes his characters according to their sound and their tones, which are indicated by superscript numbers.
He finds in his prayer book what he most needs at this time of psychological confusion and fear for his life, reassurance of some enduring principle of order that he can continue to believe in. In the DTC, Pound's most pressing concern is not the reform of governments, but self-governance. When, by means of his marginal characters, he pairs Confucian and Catholic commentaries on self-examination and self-knowledge, he does so not because he considers himself proficient in these exercises, but because he is aware of how great his need for them is. Some of Pound's marginal notations are of single characters, and, of these, some are readily recognizable to readers of Pound's poetry as the pivotal ones that appear in the Cantos and that he includes in the 'Terminology' section at the beginning of his Confucius.
Pound's contact with the priest, his study of the Catholic prayer book, and his reflections upon the ethical and spiritual dimension of the Confucian writings seen comparatively, as counterparts to the ethics and spirituality encoded in the Catholic liturgy.