EZRA POUND and the PISAN CANTOS

Old stock. A Critical study of Pounds writings while incarcerated in a US detention camp in Pisa in 1945 (see comments below).

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury".^[3] He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the fascist Italian government and its later incarnation as a German puppet state, in which he attacked the United States government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain, international finance, the arms industry, Jews, and others as abettors and prolongers of the war. He also praised both eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy, while urging American G.I.s to throw down their rifles and surrender. In 1945, Pound was captured by the Italian Resistance and handed over to the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps, who held him pending extradition and prosecution based on an indictment for treason. He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.

While in U.S. military custody in Italy, Pound continued work on The Cantos. This new work was published by New Directions in 1948 as The Pisan Cantos, for which Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the American Library of Congress, leading to enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called the United States "an insane asylum". Pound remained in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have ensured that his life and literary legacy remain highly controversial.