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John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic. By Alec Marsh. Historicizing Modernism. (London and other cities: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Pp. xvi, 301. $104.00, ISBN 978-1-4725-0886-7.)
Having published two earlier books on Ezra Pound, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa, 1998) and Ezra Pound (London, 2011), Alec Marsh now explores the relationship between the controversial poet and the Far Right activist John Kasper. From the time that twenty-one-year-old Kasper first wrote to the sixty-four-year-old Pound in June 1950 until their communication ceased in the early 1960s, the two men exchanged hundreds of letters. Although most of Pound's letters to Kasper disappeared after the younger man's death in 1998, Marsh is able to piece together the gist of their exchanges and the poet's viewpoints by analyzing Kasper's replies.
While incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, D.C., from November 1946 until April 1958, Pound welcomed many visitors, including a...