Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 23, 2025
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a World War II collaborator in Fascist Italy. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and the epic poem The Cantos (c. 1917–1962). Pound helped shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He moved to Italy in 1924, where he embraced Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism and supported Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of radio propaganda broadcasts attacking the United States, praising the Holocaust in Italy, and urging American soldiers to surrender. In 1945 Pound was captured and ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. While confined for over 12 years at a psychiatric hospital, his The Pisan Cantos (1948) was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, causing great controversy. Released in 1958, he returned, unrepentant, to Italy, where he died in 1972. (Full article...)