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POUND, EZRA 1885-1972

POET

Champion of Modernism

Ezra Pound's odyssey of ideas took him far from his birthplace in Idaho and changed American literature irrevocably. He had an uncanny eye for talent. During the 1910s and 1920s he was a champion of innovative new writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and William Carlos Williams. During the 1940s and 1950s Pound's ongoing epic poem, The Cantos (1917-1969), had a major influence on a whole new generation of poets. Yet the American public read little of his poetry and knew of him mainly as the poet who had been arrested for treason.

Expatriate in Wartime

When World War II broke out, Pound had been living in Europe since 1908 and in Rapallo, Italy, since 1924. During the 1930s he began dabbling in economics and political theory. His obsession with these subjects caused him to mistake the rise of Benito Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy for civilization remaking itself, moving beyond modern capitalism. He remained in Italy during the war, broadcasting pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American propaganda to American troops from 1941 until the Allied occupation of Italy in 1943. In 1945 he was charged with treason, arrested by the U.S. Army, and held prisoner in an outdoor cage at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Camp near Pisa. There he wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), in which he cast himself a man facing execution and recalling in a elegiac tone his life as an expatriate in Paris during the early 1920s.

The Most Famous Patient at St. Elizabeths

Pound was returned to the United States for trial, but in February 1946 a U.S. federal court ruled that he was insane and committed him to St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., until such time as he was deemed competent to stand trial. Before long, poets of wide-ranging political persuasions were making pilgrimages to St. Elizabeths, as his wife, Dorothy Pound, began a long legal battle to have him released to her custody on the grounds that he was permanently insane and could never be tried.

Literary Politics

The publication of The Pisan Cantos in July 1948 involved Pound in further controversy. The following November the current Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, Léonie Adams, and that year's Fellows in Literature met to select the winner of the Bollingen Prize, a new prize to be awarded by the library for the best volume of poetry published in 1948. There were eight votes for The Pisan Cantos—including votes from W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Allen Tate; three votes for William Carlos Williams's Paterson (Book Two)—including votes from Conrad Aiken, Karl Shapiro, and Katherine Garrison Chapin (whose husband happened to be the U.S. attorney general who had indicted Pound for treason); and two abstentions. Chapín complained to her husband, Francis Biddie, who in turn "recommended strongly against the decision" in a letter to the Librarian of Congress, Luther H. Evans. He ruled that the prize jury should vote again. Pound won the second vote too, and on 19 February 1949 the jury announced that he would be awarded the $10,000 prize. Rather than helping Pound to win public sympathy, as friends such as Eliot and Tate had hoped, the awarding of the prize to Pound caused a public outcry and hurt his chances for release. The headline in The New York Times read: "POUND, IN MENTAL CLINIC, WINS PRIZE FOR POETRY PENNED IN TREA-SON CELL." By August 1949 the Joint Committee of the House and Senate on the Library of Congress had ruled that the library could no longer award any prizes. (Yale University took over the granting of the Bollingen Prize.)

Release

In the mid 1950s Archibald MacLeish spear-headed lobbying efforts to gain Pound's release—enlisting support from Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Eliot in particular. In 1958, responding to the assertion that Pound had been in St. Elizabeths longer than he would have been imprisoned if he had been tried and found guilty of treason, a federal judge released Pound and allowed him to return to Rapallo, where he lived out the final fourteen years of his life. He wrote and published little, giving up all idea of completing The Cantos by the late 1960s. The American champion of modernism died in silence at the age of eighty-seven.