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Title: The Bughouse
Subtitle: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound
Author: Daniel Swift
Narrator: Tom Perkins
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-07-17
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 4 votes
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians
Publisher's Summary:
In 1945, the great American poet Ezra Pound was deemed insane. He was due to stand trial for treason for his fascist broadcasts in Italy during the war. Instead, he escaped a possible death sentence and was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane for more than a decade. While there, his visitors included the stars of modern poetry: T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, among others. They would sit with Pound on the hospital grounds, bring him news of the outside world, and discuss everything from literary gossip to past escapades.
This was perhaps the world's most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. Those who came often recorded what they saw. Pound was at his most infamous, most hated, and most followed. At St. Elizabeths he was a genius and a madman, a contrarian and a poet, and impossible to ignore.
In The Bughouse, Daniel Swift traces Pound and his legacy, walking the halls of St. Elizabeths and meeting modern-day neofascists in Rome. Unlike a traditional biography, The Bughouse sees Pound through the eyes of others at a critical moment both in Pound's own life and in 20th-century art and politics.
Critic Reviews:
"To understand an artist as compromised by circumstances - and by his own many contradictions - as Ezra Pound, we have to trace a complex path through a maze of half-truths, myth, and simplification. The Bughouse does so with supreme care, critical acumen, and humanity, shedding a whole new light not only on Pound the man, but also on the shape and character of The Cantos, one of the most seriously flawed and truly brilliant artworks of the twentieth century." (John Burnside)
Members Reviews:
How to deal with the great art of a terrible person
The Bughouse provides a new and valuable perspective on the Pound problem: the question of how to deal with the great art of a terrible person. To what extent, and in what ways, can we admire, or even love, the masterworks of the slaveowner or racist, the murderer or fascist? The problem is not as bad when the art has little or no direct relation to the artistâs reprehensible actions and/or ideas, but, in Poundâs case, the fascism and anti-Semitism is right there in the poetry.
Furthermore, the issue is complicated in Poundâs case by the vexed question of his sanity. The numerous mental-health professionals who examined him dramatically disagreed about this, and Swift acknowledges that âPoundâs madnessâor notâwill always remain an open question.â I was most intrigued to learn here that Poundâs defense attorney tried to use his poetry as evidence of his insanity!
Many books on Pound have, of course, grappled with this issue of the man and his work, and no single study can possibly settle this intractable problem, but this bookâs approachâlooking at the postwar Pound primarily through the writings of the fellow poets who visited him in St. Elizabeths Hospitalâmakes a real contribution. In this respect, it is like M. Owen Leeâs useful book Wagner: The Terrible Man & His Truthful Art.
It was with great interest that I purchased Daniel Swiftâs new account of ...
It was with great interest that I purchased Daniel Swiftâs new account of Ezra Poundâs time in St. Elizabeths Hospital.
