In 1939 he visited America for the first time in twenty-eight years, but returned to Italy, where from 1941 to 1943 he made radio broadcasts against American involvement in the war, which subsequently led to his indictment for treason. Judged medically unfit to stand trial, Pound was placed in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained incarcerated from 1946 until 1958. Upon his release, Pound returned to Italy, dividing his time between Rapallo, Merano, and Venice, while continuing work on his
Cantos .
Pound's career presents an extreme version of the role of expatriation within twentieth-century American letters. Although he initially went abroad as a Jamesian "passionate pilgrim" in search of the holy sites of past cultural achievement, Pound's residence in Europe paradoxically enabled him to discover himself as a contemporary American writer. An early poem addressed "To Whistler, American" might equally typify Pound's own accomplishment in exile: "You had your searches, your uncertainties, / And this is good to know--for us, I mean, / Who bear the brunt of our America / And try to wrench her impulse into art." As in Whistler's case, Paris, the capital of the avant-garde, played a crucial role in shaping Pound's vision of an art which would integrate raw American impulse with the discipline and cosmopolitanism of Continental modernism.
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