Ezra Pound's Poetry

"Outraged by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends' dismay, he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by Oswald Mosley. The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, as a result of which he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy in 1945. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years

The name sounds familiar though. But I probably thought  it was a fictional character. Certainly never knew it was a real person.

Weird.  I consider myself fairly clever (Not by comparison to some of the humbling presences on PA though) but this guy just past me by.

 

I have to re-read this stuff. Haven't read it in years, and don't remember it very well.

 

Ezra was one of my father's well known American authors that he wrote many a critical essay on for his books. That whole 50's era in American Literature was well represented in my father's work and was a serious part of his "Comparative Literature" studies and courses at the UC systems that he created in the 70's