The Cantos of Ezra Pound - Ezra Pound

One of the literary giants of the 20th Century, Ezra Pound is and was a figure of great controversy. As a modernist poet, critic, and editor, Pound exerted a large degree of influence on the writing and publishing of his day. An American expatriot working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the works of contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. This early reputation for fostering the literary talents of his day, however, is often overshadowed by the work Pound did during the Second World War to advance Benito Mussolini’s fascist government and to support fascism more broadly elsewhere. In 1945, when the US forces took control of Italy, they arrested Pound on charges of treason. The poet was deemed unfit to stand trial and was subsequently held in a psychiatric hospital until 1958. Pound began the writing of his Cantos during that initial incarceration in Italy and continued to work on them for the