Excerpt

Ezra Pound won the first Bollingen Award in 1949 for The Pisan Cantos, the book of poems he wrote while imprisoned in a U.S. military disciplinary training center in Italy. He had been arrested for making pro-Mussolini broadcasts for Rome radio during the war—the official charge was treason—and confined in the kind of outdoor cage more recently used at Guantanamo Bay. By all accounts the harsh conditions unbalanced the nearly 60-year-old poet. When Pound was flown back to the United States to stand trial, his attorney pleaded insanity on his behalf. The plea allowed Pound to avoid conviction at a…