The Bughouse

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 Federal Hospital for the Insane for over a decade. His visitors there included the stars of modern poetry: T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. They would sit and talk with Pound in the hospital grounds, and let him know what was happening in the outside world. This was perhaps the world's most…