About the book (from jacket flap):
Ezra Pound is the most controversial literary individual of our time – the same man who edited the work of Yeats and T. S. Eliot, helped introduce the poetry of Robert Frost and influenced the development of Hemingway, was also tried for treason and sent to an insane asylum.
Eustace Mullins for the first time presents the case for Ezra Pound, documenting the tremendous contribution Pound has made to contemporary American culture in a witty and biting criticism of our society, which gives lip service to poetry while imprisoning its major poet.
In an intensely persona, unforgettable portrait of Ezra Pound, Mullins tackles the questions at the heart of the lifetime of controversy and acrimony that has surrounded, encircled, and finally enclosed Ezra Pound. From Mullins’ vivid writing emerges a portrait of Ezra Pound, as an eccentric genius, a literary leader who is both outrageously outspoken and unquenchable exuberant – a man who was kind when he wanted to be, and quarrelsome when his beliefs were questioned – this difficult individual, Ezra Pound.
Mullins has documented Pound’s crash into the Victorian literary world of London in the 1920s, his membership in the expatriate Bohemia of Paris; the earlier quiet years in Rapallo and the later tumultuous ones. Included in This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound are excerpts from controversial broadcasts Pound made from Italy during World War 2; the whole record of what happened when Pound, under indictment for treason and committed to an asylum, received the official Bollingen Prize for Poetry from a jury of America’s best-known poets; and the unforgettable record of Pound’s incommunicado imprisonment in a roofless iron cage, by the American Army after his surrender in Italy.
