"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin"
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Hemingway is doing that most Hemingway thing: turning a moral mess into a matter of temperament, then daring you to argue with the posture. On the surface, he’s defending Ezra Pound’s sanity. Underneath, he’s defending a whole guild’s right to be unbearable - and a friend’s right to be protected from the blunt instruments of the state.
The line works because it splits “crazy” into two different charges. There’s the productive, almost necessary derangement of the artist (“All poets are. They have to be.”), and there’s the clinical or carceral category implied by “the loony bin.” Hemingway collapses the first into a badge of vocation, then refuses the second as an appropriate response. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand: if poetic “madness” is just the cost of genius, locking someone up isn’t treatment, it’s cultural vandalism.
Context sharpens the edge. Pound wasn’t merely eccentric; he’d broadcast fascist propaganda and was charged with treason, then confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Hemingway’s quip sidesteps politics without erasing them. It’s a pragmatic, old-world loyalty: the sin is real, but the punishment feels like a category mistake, an attempt to manage a public scandal by medicalizing it.
There’s also a self-exoneration hiding in plain sight. If poets must be “crazy,” then the writer’s worst impulses - obsession, cruelty, grandiosity - get reframed as occupational hazards. Hemingway isn’t just saving Pound; he’s preserving the myth that art requires a kind of sanctioned instability, so society should tolerate the damage as part of the deal.
The line works because it splits “crazy” into two different charges. There’s the productive, almost necessary derangement of the artist (“All poets are. They have to be.”), and there’s the clinical or carceral category implied by “the loony bin.” Hemingway collapses the first into a badge of vocation, then refuses the second as an appropriate response. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand: if poetic “madness” is just the cost of genius, locking someone up isn’t treatment, it’s cultural vandalism.
Context sharpens the edge. Pound wasn’t merely eccentric; he’d broadcast fascist propaganda and was charged with treason, then confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Hemingway’s quip sidesteps politics without erasing them. It’s a pragmatic, old-world loyalty: the sin is real, but the punishment feels like a category mistake, an attempt to manage a public scandal by medicalizing it.
There’s also a self-exoneration hiding in plain sight. If poets must be “crazy,” then the writer’s worst impulses - obsession, cruelty, grandiosity - get reframed as occupational hazards. Hemingway isn’t just saving Pound; he’s preserving the myth that art requires a kind of sanctioned instability, so society should tolerate the damage as part of the deal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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