Ezra Pound’s favorite American President
Improbably, well into the twentieth century the great modernist Ezra Pound developed a literary crush on Van Buren, in one of the strangest artist-muse relationships in the history of creative expression. “Canto 37” of his Seventy Cantos is a long-winded exploration of the issues surrounding the Panic of 1837, with some sections drawing upon Van Buren’s autobiography (written “in the vicinage of Vesuvius, in the mirror of memory”). It ends with an ecstatic Latnate celebration of the man Pound considered the author of economic freedom in America; “HIC JACET FISCI LIBERATOR” (here lies the liberator of money). Pound also wrote elsewhere that Van Buren was a “national hero” offering one of the “few clean and decent pages” in the history of the United States.
It is hard to say whether Pound’s advocacy helped or hurt Van Buren. It is safe to say that there were not many other modernist poets clamoring to defend him, or to attack him for that matter, and any attention helped. But Pound’s later zeal for Benito Mussolini did not do much to promote his reputationas a shrew judge of character. In fact, his emotional embrace of Van Buren may have helped Pound more than it helped anyone else, because it offered convincing proof, as his defenders later claimed, that the poet was completely insane.