Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound arrived in London in the early 20th century and built Imagism around precision and economy, then used his position as foreign editor to shepherd the century's literature into print: he serialized Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914, published Eliot's "Prufrock" in 1915, and pushed Ulysses into the world in 1918. World War I turned him toward obsession - he blamed the carnage on finance capitalism, called it "usury," and moved to Italy in 1924. Through the 1930s he promoted social credit theory, wrote for Oswald Mosley's fascist publications, and embraced Mussolini; during World War II he recorded hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government attacking Roosevelt, Jews, international finance, urging American soldiers to surrender, and praising both eugenics and the Holocaust. The Italian Resistance captured him in 1945 and handed him to U.S. forces, who held him in a detention camp near Pisa - three weeks in an outdoor steel cage - before flying him back on a treason indictment. Ruled unfit for trial, he spent over 12 years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, wrote The Pisan Cantos in custody, and won the Bollingen Prize in 1949, tr