A racist, anti-Semite, and proponent of Hitler's butchery and Mussolini's Fascism, Pound supported the Italian government in short-wave broadcasts over Rome Radio that were addressed to the English-speaking world. In 1942, he repudiated democracy as "judeocracy" and declared American involvement in the war illegal. After the U.S. military arrested Pound in Genoa in May 1945, he was imprisoned outside Pisa for treason. After being returned to Washington, D.C., for trial, in February 1946, Pound escaped hard prison time by pleading insanity and senility. Critics accused him of perpetuating the pose of raving paranoic to avoid retrial and possible execution. Extolled as a modernist experimenter, he pursued an epic series, The Pisan Cantos (1948) and The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1948). In an atmosphere of jubilance and victory marred by virulent charges of fakery, he accepted the 1949 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, which included a $1,000 purse awarded by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress.
In 1958, Pound, then aged 72, gained release from an asylum through the intervention of an impressive list of colleagues, including Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Carl Sandburg, and T. S. Eliot. Freed of all charges, he returned to Italy. He continued writing and, without pausing to refine his work, published Thrones: Cantos 96–109 (1959) and Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1968). When he died on November 1, 1972, he was laid among exiles on the island of San Michele beneath a stone that bears only "Ezra Pound."
