The nature of genius

On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome Radio from 29 January 1942 to July 1943. To avoid his almost certain conviction for treason (and the death penalty visited on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw), the superintendent Winfred Overholser testified that Pound was insane and unfit to stand trial. Overholser connived with Julien Cornell, Pound’s lawyer. He elided the testimony of six psychiatrists, whose verdict was more equivocal. He concentrated instead on Pound’s brief, understandable breakdown after being kept in a cage at the Disciplinary Training Centre’s stockade in Pisa. A. David Moody in his exemplary three-volume life of Pound delivers this lucid conclusion: ‘The almost unanimous view of the psychiatrists present at the conference was that Pound was neither insane nor incompetent.’ Not to embarrass their superior, the shrinks recorded no formal diagnosis. It was a fix. On 18 April 1958, the indictment against Pound was dismissed, on the grounds of incurable insanity, and he was released after more than 12 years.