The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound

London-based academic and essayist Swift (Shakespeare’s Common Prayers) gives an intriguing, if overwrought, account of Ezra Pound’s 12-year stay in St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal psychiatric hospital near Washington, D.C. In Swift’s estimation, Pound (1885–1972) had a starring role in 20th-century poetry and the birth of modernism. Swift begins his account in 1945 with Pound’s arrest and imprisonment in Italy, where the poet had made profascist radio broadcasts throughout WWII. Pound suffered a nervous breakdown after being kept for weeks in an outdoor cage and, willing to be declared insane instead of being tried for treason, went to what he called the “bughouse,” St. Elizabeths. Too many digressions and descriptions of Swift’s research experiences blunt this story’s impact, but Swift does vividly describe Pound’s confinement, which lasted until 1958. A stubborn patient who refused the mandated occupational therapy, Pound read and wrote constantly and received a parade of famous guests—Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams among them. Some leading psychiatrists and admirers (then and since) have thought Pound was faking insanity, but Swift thinks he may not have been. Swift’s unfocused narrative style gets in the way of probing study, but Pound’s ambiguous sanity and larger-than-life personality still make for fascinating subjects. Many readers will be drawn in, even if they find Pound himself detestable. (Nov.)