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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

143

Document Type

Article

Abstract

For most of his adult life Ezra Loomis Pound, Idaho-born and Pennsylvania-reared, was an American abroad. At various times he lived in Venice, London, Paris. In 1928, he settled in Rapallo, in Italy. When World War II broke out, he chose to remain there. Beginning in October of 1941, and through at least July of 1943, he made a series of English language broadcasts from Rome for the Mussolini government, which were directed to English and American audiences. In 1945, Pound was taken into custody by American military authorities and held at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa. In November of that year he was flown to Washington, D.C., to be tried on charges of treason arising out of his radio speeches. Section II of this article considers the case against Pound. His was one of a small number of American treason prosecutions arising out of the Second World War. Unlike the other treason prosecutions of that era, however, the charge of treason against Pound was never tried on the merits. Pound was determined to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. He was then held at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane for nearly thirteen years--untried, unconvicted, and presumed innocent. During that time he was visited by the great literati of the English-speaking world: by T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Louis Zukofsky, Langston Hughes, Marshall McLuhan, and others. During that time he completed The Pisan Cantos, in many ways his greatest poetic achievement. He also produced important poetry translations from a variety of languages. Section III of this article considers in detail the adjudicatory process by which Pound was determined to be incompetent to stand trial, and the aftermath of that determination. A disclaimer is appropriate here: Neither section III in particular, nor this article in general, is intended as an authoritative treatment of Pound's complex life or more complex work. Such a treatment would be beyond the scope of this article, and far beyond the scholarship of its author. Pound's life and work, and more particularly that strangely fascinating part of his life and work that led to his indictment, culminated in his trial, and had as its denouement his incarceration in and then liberation from St. Elizabeth's, are discussed not in any attempt to offer a definitive critique of Pound the man or Pound the poet, but as a jumping-off point to consideration of the law of criminal incompetence. That subject matter is considered in section IV, which poses a hypothetical question so thoroughly hypothetical it could be posed only in a law-review article: How would Pound's case be treated today? That statute and case law more clearly define the procedural law governing, and the procedural rights afforded, the putatively incompetent criminal defendant today than was the case in Ezra Pound's era is a safe generalization. That said, it is far from clear that Pound was treated worse at the hands of the law than a defendant similarly situated would be treated today. Generalizations are no more applicable to Pound the litigant than they are to Pound the poet.

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