Word: pound
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...butts struck the door of the apartment near Rapallo where Pound lived à trois with his wife Dorothy and his mistress of many years, a violinist named Olga Rudge. He was taken to a military stockade near Pisa and installed on death row in a steel cage 6 ft. square and open to all weathers. After three weeks of treatment designed to break the spirits of the most hardened criminals, Pound suffered a severe emotional breakdown...
Amnesty Movement. Poetry saved him. Recuperating slowly in a medical tent, he sat at the orderly's typewriter and pecked out his most personal and moving poems, the great Pisan Cantos. With eyes unsealed by shock, Pound finally saw himself as he was seen-a vain "beaten dog beneath the hail/ A swollen magpie in a fitful sun." He was flown back to the States to face trial for treason, but the case never came to judgment. Declared hopelessly insane. Pound was committed to a federal bedlam in the District of Columbia...
...eerie purgatory. The patients in the ward, says Heymann, sat "sunk in listless dejection" or "crawled about on their knees or stood on chairs and howled." Eventually transferred to a section for the less disturbed, Pound was allowed to see visitors for two hours a day. They came by the score: Thornton Wilder, Robert Lowell, Katherine Ann Porter, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot. During the last eleven years of Pound's commitment, America's most illustrious literary salon was conducted in a madhouse...
...visits restored Pound's spirits-and his obnoxiousness. He flaunted a succession of new female acquaintances in the face of his devoted wife, wrote contemptuous letters to eminent friends and spewed more antiSemitism. But he also completed two large new regions of his epic Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares (1955) and Thrones de los Cantares...
...amnesty movement was organized, and Robert Frost was invited to the Eisenhower White House to discuss "this difficult individual." On April 18, 1958, advised by psychiatrists that Pound was too crazy to stand trial but not crazy enough to need confinement, a federal judge dismissed the treason indictment and ordered the 72-year-old poet's release...