The Bughouse cover art

The Bughouse

The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound

Preview

Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Bughouse

Written by: Daniel Swift
Narrated by: Tom Perkins
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $40.44

Buy Now for $40.44

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

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.

©2017 Daniel Swift (P)2017 Tantor
20th Century Art & Literature Literature & Fiction Rome War Hospital
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What the critics say

"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)

What listeners say about The Bughouse

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.