Auberon Waugh, formerly editor of this magazine, could be a cruel tease, as I recall from my time at Downside, where he was two years above me. Met a little later, in the Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford in 1960, Waugh was politeness, charm and restraint. One of his early feats was to torment Ezra Pound in phone calls to him in the madhouse. Waugh would ask him what specific passages in The Cantos might mean and then destroy Pound’s lengthy typewritten replies after having his laugh.

Pound had returned to Italy in 1958, having been parked for twelve years in a criminal mental asylum in Washington, DC. During the war, he had espoused pro-Axis and anti-Semitic views in a series of broadcasts for Rome Radio, paid for by the Fascist government, resulting in his arrest on suspicion of treason once the war ended. He had been found mentally unfit to stand trial.

In his mocking phone calls, Waugh was guying Pound as an outdated eccentric. This impression was publicly reinforced by a collapse in Pound’s health and morale a few months after his return to Italy. He began to tell people that his life’s work had no value: ‘I am not a lunatic, but a moron.’ By the time I went to visit him in Rapallo in 1962, Pound was showing signs of bipolarity. He was also recovering from a prostate operation and bed-bound.

How was it that I came, aged twenty-one, to be visiting this old man? The journey was prompted by his vigorous translation of the Old English poem ‘The Seafarer’. This strikingly brilliant adaptation had led the poet Peter Whigham, an admirer of Pound, to suggest that, since I would be studying Old English at Oxford, I should attempt poetic translations of other short Old English poems. He encouraged me to commit to this project in 1959 with a gift of £100. This act of wild generosity was like the encouragement Pound himself used to give to younger writers. Penguin Classics agreed to publish my translations when I was still an undergraduate. The resulting book, The Earliest English Poems, appeared in 1965.

Olga Rudge, a violinist who became Pound’s companion in his later years, greeted me at her door in Rapallo with ‘Mr Beowulf, I presume.’ I asked the poet if he would accept the dedication of my book. He replied, slowly and heavily from his bed: ‘If you think … it could be done … without irony.’ This I took as conventional modesty. But I was wrong: Pound genuinely believed that his translation was no good and that he was not worthy of the dedication. How large a part his collapse in morale was due to the confusion and pain he felt at his re-entry to an outer world that had greatly changed, I do not know. A green youth, I was scarcely aware of the extent of Pound’s support for Fascism or of the intensity of his anti-Semitism.

The truth about Pound’s political and racial views became fully clear in the UK with the publication of his Rome Radio broadcasts. London now began to drop Pound; much earlier, in New York, Arthur Miller had written that Pound was worse than Hitler. Pound continued to be read and admired by a number of American poets and a few British ones. Otherwise he was hardly read here. He was known to be Bad.

I visited Pound again in Rapallo in 1963. He was less depressed but stuck to his elected silence. He had spoken too much; now it was tempus tacendi. I saw him a third time in January 1965 after T S Eliot’s memorial service, standing in the cold outside Westminster Abbey. I said a brief hello to him. Stephen Spender approached and asked Pound if he remembered Spender’s visit to him in the asylum. Pound’s reply was ‘No.’ Valerie Eliot later told me that Pound had written to her from Italy before the service to ask if he would ‘be received’ in her home.

I had resolved that I would not trouble him again, but there were further meetings in the 1960s, after I chanced to see him walking along the Zattere in Venice with Olga Rudge. Olga pressed me to come to visit them in her tiny house nearby. Pound had more than once expressed public regret for ‘all that shit about the Jews’. In private, he spoke very little.

*

Next month will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Pound’s death. He was born in a small mining settlement in Idaho called Hailey and educated in Philadelphia. After twelve years in London, which he left in 1920, he lived mostly in Rapallo and in Venice, where he died at the age of eighty-seven. He was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele, near Stravinsky. My short epitaph: ‘Ezra Pound/Got around:/He was born in Hailey/But he was buried in San Michele.’

Pound’s activities before and early in the First World War – as ‘discoverer’ of Eliot, promoter of Joyce and collaborator with Yeats – will not be forgotten. Eliot named him as dedicatee of The Waste Land, which Pound had shaped and reduced in length by one third. Those who read literary criticism were awakened by Pound to fields they did not know, often foreign fields. The standing of Pound’s own poetry is, however, less secure.

The modernist explosions of 1922 are now a century old. The best of Eliot and Joyce retains high favour, though advanced modernism is not for a wide public. Pound’s Cantos are scarcely read. I set a firm value on parts of his work, especially in the field of translation (he translated from ten languages), notably his epoch-making adaptations of Chinese poetry. His translations and imitations are poetic and daringly inventive; they are also faithful to the originals in ways rarely matched by most scholarly translations.

Pound’s departure from London in 1921 removed him from British memories, though Eliot went on loyally publishing him. There is a sense in which, if we set Eliot to one side (a big ‘if’), modernist poetry never really caught on in England. But Pound’s political activities have radically reduced his readership. Is there a case for a somewhat autonomous standing for works of art – if they are good works of art – created by those with objectionable views? There is. Otherwise we are left with Beatrix Potter.