Here's the review. It's from the Feb. 5 edition of WSJ February 5, 1999 Bookshelf What Prison Taught the Poet By HUGH KENNER The bare facts have been accessible for half a century. The American poet Ezra Pound, since 1924 a resident of Italy, was arrested in May 1945 by occupying American troops on account of pro-Mussolini broadcasts he had made over Rome Radio. A few weeks later he was transferred to the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, kept there in a cage and later moved to a tent. There, aged 60, he wrote the "Pisan Cantos," an unforeseeable segment of his magnum opus. In mid-November he was flown to Washington for a trial he was next judged unfit to stand. He would spend the next 12 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Whoever visited Pound at "St. Liz," as I first did in mid-1948, would recall the calm presence of his wife, Dorothy. They had been married since before World War I, and her Edwardian-British manner remained unmistakable. After decades of contagion, Ezra's manner, likewise, was more British than one would have expected. Despite what I'd have guessed from his hyper-American epistolary style, he was the first man I'd ever met who always spoke in complete sentences. What I first heard from his lips was a subordinate clause: "Since you are younger and more vigorous than I...perhaps you will not mind if I sit here...." That alcove with four chairs, at a juncture of madhouse corridors, might have been a drawing room, so much did Dorothy's presence transfigure it. "Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-46," a collection of the couple's letters, moves in now with a magnifier on the chaotic two-year fulcrum of events you've just heard tidily paraphrased. One thing paraphrase sweeps under the rug is that, from some time before Pound's arrest until Dorothy got to Washington -- a hectic 12 months -- no one involved really knew what was going on. Hence the frantic quality of all efforts at communication evident in this book. Italy is just putting itself back together; restoration of rail service from Genoa to Rome is one 1946 event. The trans-Atlantic mail is erratic: "Four of yours by today's post!" writes Dorothy to Ezra on "Ap 17.46," what has just arrived having been written in Washington in early March. And after endless efforts to schedule something useful, the ship Dorothy finally boards for America is two weeks getting there, with at one point half the passengers seasick. Yes, that was then. Nowadays, of course, we fly. So, lacking an easy sequence wherein each letter responds to the letter just above it, editors Omar Pound and Robert Spoo have had to guide us through a morass of cross-reference. Their book places letters on each right-hand page, explanations and identifications on the page facing it. Dorothy wrote frequently, Ezra when he was allowed to; from the moment he was arrested, every page to which he'd put pencil had to make its way past a (usually permissive) censor. For her part, Dorothy understood that the mere arrival of mail, whatever its content, would give him cheer. Hence ("Jan 29.46"), "We have a tin of peanut butter! From the sister of that tall Pole. She is charming; more of her anon....Yes, I have quite a lot of patience; & propose exercising it near you, as soon as possible." Messrs. Pound and Spoo have also supplied documents that clarify the legal situation and the extent to which the American authorities and the man they had in custody were perpetually at cross-purposes. It was one of Pound's delusions that he possessed political knowledge of which the U.S. government would want to avail itself, for instance by dispatching him to Moscow to clue Stalin in. That clarifies a "Cantos" detail -- and but one point needed for Stalin you need not, i.e. need not take over the means of production; money to signify work done, inside a system and measured and wanted. He was a while realizing that all the Army wanted was to lock him up for trial concerning the brief broadcasts he'd aimed at America in the hope of persuading the homefolks that Mussolini wasn't the demon they'd been imagining. The investigations entailed delays, since a case for treason required locating two witnesses to the delivery of each broadcast, and the broadcasts had been delivered months or years before, and how to find Romans who had been in the studio on this occasion or that one? It's easy to see why, during preparation of the case, Pound had to be kept in Pisa for months: the months to which we owe the "Pisan Cantos." We learn, too, one more detail of great value, considering the notorious, if intermittent, anti-Semitism in the broadcasts. On being installed in the cage in Pisa (where "a tin can served for a toilet"), Pound "was allowed to keep his volume of Confucius and the small Chinese dictionary, and was given a regular-issue Bible." (That would be the Bible that, as he told me one day, he'd read clear through; he imagined he was the only person who had read through the Bible after reading Confucius.) Now, some two-thirds of the Bible is written in Hebrew, and bespeaks centuries of Jewish responses to Jewish plights. And possibly the most famous, and most cherished, passage in the "Pisan Cantos" derives from such responses: The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace. Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.... Pull down thy vanity How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity, Pull down thy vanity, Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. That ant derives from Proverbs 6:6: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which, having no guide, overseer or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest." And as for vanity, turn almost anywhere in Ecclesiastes, for instance 2:11: "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." The ant and vanity are just a few pages apart in the Hebrew Bible, the one seeing to necessary things, the other wasting its labor on vexation of spirit. What Pound would one day regret as "that stupid, suburban, anti-Semitic prejudice" may have begun to dissipate in the Pisan cage. I know that I once brought a Jewish friend to visit him at St. Elizabeth's, and they got on well, and the friend went back on his own another time. And one moral is, beware of generalizations. Mr. Kenner is a professor of English at the University of Georgia. "The Pound Era" is the best known of his numerous books. hugh witemeyer wrote: > > The eagerly anticipated edition of the correspondence of Pound and Dorothy > during the Pisan period of 1945 is apparently just out from Oxford > University Press in New York. Its editors are those veteran collaborators > and superb annotators, Omar Pound and Bob Spoo. I am told that Hugh > Kenner reviewed the edition this month in the WALL STREET JOURNAL. Can > anyone tell us the issue in which that review appeared?