During World War II Ezra Pound, ranked with America’s greatest modern poets, broadcast from Italy endorsing Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime and hurling recriminations against the Allies. British scholar A. David Moody brings the story to its conclusion with The Tragic Years, examining the records and finding that his Italian hosts regarded him as a loose cannon. One official complained of his “disorderly mind” and “fantastic notions.” Pound was obsessed with the evils of the international banking system. He blamed the Jews and castigated them viciously on Radio Rome even as Il Duce quietly kept many Jews from the clutches of the Nazis. Moody patiently weighs Pound’s words and deeds, finding a brilliant writer and a stubborn but charming man who—years later—grudgingly conceded that he might have been wrong.
