Olivia Rossetti Agresti Papers

The Olivia Rossetti Agresti Papers document Agresti's relationship with the poet after World War II and her own political and economic beliefs during that period. The papers span the dates 1947-1963 and have been organized into two series: I. Correspondence and II. Writings.

Series I, Correspondence is housed in folders 1-33 and has been arranged alphabetically by correspondent. The major correspondent is Ezra Pound himself; the letters begin in 1947 while he was confined in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Pound's letters usually deal with the political and economic themes that preoccupied him during this period. Attacks on Roosevelt, Churchill and the postwar Western democracies, approval for Fascism mingled with regret that Mussolini and Hitler were uninterested in Social Credit, dismissals of Christianity and denunciations of Jewish ideas and influence, are mixed with demands that Agresti read Brooks Adams and Del Mar, discuss recent events with Luigi Villari, or translate some work that Pound has recently discovered.

Pound's vivid condemnations of Christianity and of Jews were perhaps intensified by his knowledge that Agresti disagreed with him on these subjects. The carbons of her letters to him contain many approving references to the Catholic Church in Italy and to the necessity of faith in the postwar world, while a 1954 attack on Judaism and Jews brought her response: "I am profoundly convinced that it is wrong to foster generalizations that make a whole people or race responsible for the actions of some. Samuel Lloyd and Hamilton seem to me good Bt. names." Agresti and Pound also frequently clashed with her on the topic of David Lubin: while Agresti admired his thought, Pound was inclined to argue that Lubin's work was inferior.

Other topics include Pound's growing concern about drug addiction among the young in the United States, particularly heroin addiction, and his belief that the drug trade was a racial conspiracy; various projects for obtaining Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's; the profound social changes in postwar Italy and America; contemporary literature and the arts; and Pound's daughter Mary and Agresti's family.

The letters of Pound's wife Dorothy, located in folders 11-12, contain news of Pound's health and daily activities and messages dictated by Pound.

Agresti's brief correspondence with T. S. Eliot is found in folder 6; while he responded politely to her announcement of the founding of the Committee for the Defense of Classical Culture, he declined to take an active role in freeing Pound from confinement, pointing out "that Mr. Pound has never been tried, and therefore cannot be pardoned." Other correspondents include Buddhadeva Bose, Louis Dudek, Hugh Kenner, and Olga Rudge, who writes seeking Agresti's support for defenses of Pound. Giovanni Giovannini's letters document the sale of a group of Pound's letters to Yale University.

Series II, Writings , contains two short biographical pieces by Agresti; a statement, apparently by Rossetti, that Pound "has never mixed up in the internal affairs of Italy;" and a transcript of Pound's "Four Steps."