The Bughouse: The poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound - Softcover

"It is Swift’s considerable achievement sympathetically to examine an extraordinary, often troubling, tale...an enthralling narrative" (Robert McCrum Observer)

"An extraordinary book of real passionate research which keeps surprising and illuminating by turns." (Edmund de Waal)

"Lively and searching... He has an engaging authorial presence and his own hesitations and uncertainties about Ezra Pound, both as poet and personality, lend a certain tension and a pleasing piquancy to his narrative" (Eric Ormsby Times Literary Supplement)

"Swift is a sensitive and thoughtful reader of both poetry and human psychology... The Bughouse is also a kind of immersive adventure journalism, in which he retraces Pound's steps and tries to unearth new details about his life" (Adam Kirsch New Statesman)

"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)

"A wonderful portrait of Ezra Pound in all his moods - mad, bad and blindingly sane." (A. Alvarez)

"Swift does a fine job of allowing Pound’s many contradictions to stay in place and reminds us, too, that 45 years after his death there are plenty of contradictions left in the people who admire him" (James Walton Daily Mail)

"It is a tribute to the brightness of The Bughouse that Swift has revived my interest in the old monster" (Roger Lewis The Times)

"Swift’s strength is his refusal to separate Pound’s writings from the issues of Fascism and insanity... Sharp-eyed and pacey...it highlights memorably the tangled relations between lunatic, lover and poet" (Robert Crawford Literary Review)

"[A] remarkable study of [Ezra Pound’s] fertile afterlife" (Suzi Feay Financial Times)

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal

In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade.

At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum.

Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.