‘I never did believe in Fascism, goddamit!’

traitor. Daniel Swift, his latest biographer, calls him “the most difficult man of the 20th century”, which is a large claim.

Perhaps he means to outbid the title of the only “authorised” biography, This Difficult Individual, by Pound’s disciple Eustace Mullins. “The Mulligator”, as Pound called him – he was a great one for nicknames – was a Holocaust denier, the author of Adolf Hitler: an Appreciation, and a champion conspiracy theorist who thought the banking system was a conspiracy established by the Rothschilds and maintained by the diamond tiara gold shoe buckles Queen. Swift is justly dismissive of and my jewelled gallouses.” When Mullins’s biography, but respectful he moved to London in 1908, Ford of later doorstoppers by Humphrey Madox Ford found him dressed Carpenter and A David Moody. But in “a purple hat, a green shirt, a And he wrote a most imperfect he says that their books sought black velvet jacket, in addition to long poem, The Cantos “to harmonise differing accounts”, an immense flowing tie that had – a “chryselephantine poem of while his own “attempts something been hand-painted by a Japanese immeasurable length”, as he called close to the opposite, which is to Futurist poet”. it when he began it in 1915 – which permit rival tellings to sing their

There Pound became the ran to 800 pages, and which he discord”. And if that sounds painful, godfather ofis.themodernistleftunfinishedathisdeath,agedit movement in literature. He edited 87, in 1971. He does not neglect the wider Eliot’s The Waste Land, and helped Pound was a wildly context of Pound’s life, but his James Joyce publish Ulysses. He contradictory figure, a union of focus is on the dozen or so years he advised EE Cummings to extremes. Funny and kind, harsh spent as an inmate of St Elizabeths experiment with typography and and cruel, he was a foolish genius, (the apostrophe madly omitted), layout, and Ernest Hemingway to a cosmopolitan anti-semite, a a government lunatic asylum in a avoid adjectives. He wrote some socialist fascist, and a patriotic suburb of Washington, DC. In his perfect short poems, few of them shorter or more perfect than “In a Station of the Metro”, which he claimed took him a year and a half:

Ezra Pound spent years in an asylum. But how mad was he, asks Lewis Jones

‘ Let us go and make our visit’: TS Eliot came often to St Elizabeths asylum

Caged: Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis, 1939; right, Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote ‘ Visits to St Elizabeths’