Pound was a naive idiot. His politics, however, were not Fascist. He supported Mussolini because he thought Mussolini supported Pound’s economic ideas, not realising that they were contrary to Fascism. He had a Trump-sized ego and a bad case of Dunning-Kruger system where history, economics and linguistics were concerned. But he didn’t actually do harm to a significant number of people and some of his poetry is brilliant - quite amusing that the man who edited The Waste Land into the great English poem of the first part of the 20th century did not seem to see the need for an editor for himself.
I contrast him with the English critic Kenneth Tynan, who subjected his wife to non-consensual sexual beating (he had an anal obsession apparently). He did harm to an identifiable human being. Pound, out of the weird ideas circulating in his head, did abstract harm but never got around to individual harm.
In the same way T S Eliot’s fashionable 1920s anti-Semitism, caught from Pound, didn’t really do any damage except to Eliot’s reputation.
It’s difficult to tread a path around these issues and decide the correct response. I try to separate the work from the artist but with lingering feelings of discomfort. I wouldn’t have a personal relationship with any of these people, but when it comes to buying a book or watching a movie many other people are involved who are in no way responsible for what a producer or writer may have done in his personal life.
