Ezra Pound was born in the Middle West in 1885: he came to Europe in 1908: he was at the height of his fame in the ‘thirties with the publication of successive volumes of his title-less epic poem known as The Cantos: in 1945 he disappeared from the public eye. This is what happened. From the late ‘twenties Ezra Pound had been in sympathy with the régime in Italy, seeing in Mussolini a practical philosopher after his own heart, ‘ordering’, ‘building’, ‘draining swamps’, ‘renewing the empire’: a creative ruler comparable to his other heroes, Thomas Jefferson, Pietro-Leopoldo of Tuscany, Sigismondo Malatesta, and the Great Emperors and Divine Sages of ancient China. In 1939, having spent seventeen years in Italy, he returned to the United States to warn the American people against Roosevelt’s policy, unsuccessfully urging them to reject it before it led them into war. Back in Italy in 1940, but before Italy had entered the war, he began a series of broadcasts on Rome Radio against Roosevelt, and American ‘usurocracy’. After the declaration of war, he continued the broadcasts with increasing animus; was indicted as a traitor; in 1945 was taken into detention by the invading United States army, and imprisoned alone in a barbed- wire cage in a military prison at Pisa. In this cage, which according to reports available, offered no protection at all, he spent two months, being then sixty yean old, exposed to the variations of the Italian climate and to the ill-treatment of the negro guards who used to while away their time tormenting him with their bayonets.