“Pull down Thy Vanity”: A Discussion of “The Analyst's Hatred of Analysis”

Ezra Pound wrote the above lines while detained in Pisa (under 300 kilometers from Assisi) during the summer of 1945. He was held there before his extradition to the United States on charges of treason for giving a series of broadcasts on Radio Rome that supported Mussolini and denounced the United States' participation in the Second World War (Sieburth 2003).

In some ways, Ezra Pound's story echoes aspects of the story of St. Francis that Nathan Kravis uses to illustrate his ideas about the analyst's hatred of analysis. Both Pound and St. Francis were ambitious men with a diagnostic eye for what they felt ailed the world. Both saw the ways in which wealth was distributed as pathological, and attempted in their own ways to influence the way that wealth and power were conjoined: Pound through his radio broadcasts, prose, and verse, and St. Francis through his works and the founding of the Franciscan order. And both fell prey in the end to varieties of narcissism that left them on the sidelines of the movements they founded—and, in Pound's case, disgraced and institutionalized.