Autograph letter signed to Robert Lowry, Rapallo, postmarked 17 October 1939 by POUND, Ezra

Some light wear along sheet edges, generally in fine condition. Folio (27.5 x 22 cm). A bifolium, grided paper, written on rectos only, with original mailing envelope addressed to Lowry in Pound's hand. Pound writes to Robert Lowry, who had started his Little Man Press with the artist James Flora in Cincinnati the previous year. Lowry had apparently indicated to Pound that he was not going to print an essay by Ronald Duncan, who Pound met in 1937 and encouraged to found the little magazine 'Townsman.' In a characteristically fiery tone, but one indicative of his toxic politics, Pound tells Lowry "Sorry you aren't using Duncan. Indicates to me the almost impossibility of bringing ANY american publication up to date. i.e. within 20 years of contemporary thought. The point of the Duncan is to 'Define money'. & the contemporaneity ... i.e. time element is the fact that just THAT point is the one no english printer Dare print. Just as name Rothschild is suppressed in that bloody and jew buggoid nation... young men who can't NOW see the importance of [Winfred] Overholser are out. I mean they just won't make the grade of the 1940s." It was a volatile period for Pound, one in which he was embracing fascism to an alarming degree: In April of 1939, Pound had sailed for New York hoping he could deter America from entering World War II. He traveled to Washington, D. C. and met senators and congressmen. He earned an honorary doctorate from Hamilton in June and then returned to Italy, where he began writing antisemitic material for Italian newspapers. After war broke out in September, he wrote a furious letter to the politicians he had met in Washington, arguing that the war was a result of an international banking conspiracy. Though writing to Lowry in the context of literary matters, it is clear that Pound had descended into the depths of the repugnant politics that would do all but break him. His reference to Winfred Overholser is prescient: Overholser was an American psychiatrist, president of the American Psychiatric Association, and for 25 years the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal institution for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Pound became his most famous patient in 1945.