There is a passage midway through Ezra Pound's seventy-fourth canto (74.314–62), the first of a new sequence composed during his incarceration at Pisa in 1945, that is representatively dizzying in its rotating frames of reference and associational logic. Its basic proposition, however, is relatively straightforward: as opposed to the philistine ‘they’ who have defaced London's old Adelphi Theatre with a new Art Deco façade (in 1930, sight unseen by Pound), and who thus stand in for the circumvolving chaos of Circe's pigsty, there are readily available signs and portents, gestures and acts, rules and principles, by which we may yet learn to live a worthy life together. This canto is the first to be offered under the sign of Paradise, albeit a paradiso compromised and imperilled in its essence by the catastrophic course of contemporary history; its embattled defence of the necessary elements of a just renewal is therefore issued in the inevitable key of irony. Pound sits in a US Army Disciplinary Training Center, as a trainee, planning what he will say to Stalin, to Truman, to Hirohito, to negotiate a just peace, and concretising his wisdom in poetic form; while all around him fascism, the ‘enormous tragedy of the dream’ (74.1), collapses under the Allied campaign and the US government prefers charges of treason against him. And yet, notwithstanding the hateful deployment of a racist epithet in the second line, there is rather more here than defiance, and considerably less than repentance. Rather, what the poet seeks to achieve is something like a metamorphic poesis of the lost cause, its prosodic transposition into broken cadences, fallen metres, gemlike verbal remains, seeds of a better day to fertilise the ruins. And prison, where Pound took his eucalyptus seedpod and text of The Unwobbling Pivot, is the ideal situation to arrange for such a metamorphosis; as, behind the barbed wire and the guard towers, with no radio over which to bark, no library with which to commune, there is only the work of form – finally, after years of avoiding the Muse, a locked door, a notebook and a pen.