Editing Ezra Pound (section)

==Italy (1958–1972)==
===Depression===
[[File:Ezra Pound in 1958, with Usher Burdick 3.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|alt=photograph|Pound with Congressman [[Usher Burdick]] just after his release from St. Elizabeth's in 1958. Burdick had helped to secure the release.<ref>Carpenter (1988), 832</ref>]]

Pound and Dorothy arrived in Naples on the {{SS|Cristoforo Colombo}} on 9 July 1958, where Pound was photographed giving a [[Roman salute#Italy|fascist salute]] to the waiting press.<ref>Carpenter (1988), 848</ref> When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum."<ref>[https://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=FA0E12FF3C5F117B93C2A8178CD85F4C8585F9 "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum{{'"}}]. ''The New York Times'', 10 July 1958</ref> They were accompanied by a young teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, ostensibly acting as his secretary.<ref>Tytell (1987), 305, 327–328; Carpenter (1988), 848</ref> Disembarking at Genoa, the group arrived three days later at [[Schloss Brunnenburg]], near [[Merano]] in [[South Tyrol]], to live with his daughter Maria,<ref>Carpenter (1988), 848; Moody (2015), xxxvii</ref> where Pound met his grandchildren for the first time.<ref name=Tytell328>Tytell (1987), 328</ref>{{efn|The women soon fell out; "Canto CXIII" may have alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness / 3 pains of hell."<ref>Pound (1996), 807; Tytell (1987), 331</ref>}} Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Spann was seen off, sent back to the United States in October 1959.<ref>Tytell (1987), 332; Stoicheff (1995), 40</ref><!--say more about Spann-->

By December 1959 Pound was mired in depression.<ref>Tytell (1987), 347</ref> According to the writer Michael Reck, who visited him several times at St. Elizabeths,<ref name=Reck1986>Reck (1986)</ref> Pound was a changed man; he said little and called his work "worthless".<ref>Reck (1968), 27</ref> In a 1960 interview in Rome with [[Donald Hall]] for ''Paris Review'', he said: "You—find me—in fragments." He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life".<ref>[https://archive.today/20130416003348/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound Hall (1962)]; Tytell (1987), 333</ref>

[[File:Tirol Brunnenburg.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|left|In 1958 Ezra and Dorothy lived with Mary at [[Brunnenburg]].]]

Those close to him thought he had dementia, and in mid-1960 he spent time in a clinic when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary tract infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga Rudge, first in Rapallo then in Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar.<ref name=Tytell1987p334>Tytell (1987), 334–335</ref> In 1961 Pound attended a meeting in Rome in honor of [[Oswald Mosley]], who was visiting Italy.<ref>Redman (2001), 260</ref>{{efn|According to [[John Tytell]] and [[Humphrey Carpenter]], he was photographed on [[May Day]] at the head of a [[Neo-fascism|neo-fascist]] [[Italian Social Movement|Movimento Sociale Italiano]] parade of 500 men.<ref>Tytell (1987), 334–335; Carpenter (1988), 873–874</ref> This did not happen, according to [[Tim Redman]] and A. David Moody, and no such photograph has emerged.<ref>Moody (2015), 424</ref>}} 

In 1966 he was admitted to the [[University of Genoa|Genoa School of Medicine]]'s psychiatric hospital for an evaluation after prostate surgery. His notes said he had [[psychomotor retardation]], insomnia, depression, and he believed he had been "contaminated by microbes".<ref>Rossi (2008), 144</ref> According to a psychiatrist who treated him, Pound had previously been treated with [[electroconvulsive therapy]]. This time he was given [[imipramine]] and responded well. The doctors diagnosed [[bipolar disorder]].<ref name=Rossi2008pp145-146>Rossi (2008), 145–146</ref> Two years later he attended the opening of an exhibition in New York featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's ''The Waste Land''.<ref name=Nadel2007p18>Nadel (2007), 18</ref> He went on to Hamilton College and received a standing ovation.<ref>Tytell (1987), 337</ref>

===Meeting Ginsberg, Reck, and Russell===
Pound's biographer, Michael Reck, claimed to have had an encounter with Pound at the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice in 1967,<ref name=Reck1986/> during which Pound told [[Allen Ginsberg]] and [[Peter Russell (poet)|Peter Russell]] that his own poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through". Reck wrote about the meeting in ''[[Evergreen Review]]'' the following year. "At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron," Pound reportedly said. He "looked very morose" and barely spoke: "There is nothing harder than conversing with Pound nowadays," Reck wrote.<ref>Reck (1968), 28–29, 84.</ref>

Pound had offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck. When Ginsberg reassured Pound that he had "shown us the way", he is said to have replied: "Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things." Reck continued: "Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.{{'"}}<ref>Reck (1968), 29; Carpenter (1988), 898–899</ref>{{efn|In 1988 [[Christopher Ricks]] took issue with Pound's use of the word ''mistake'', which he wrote was "scarcely commensurate with the political and spiritual monstrosity" of Pound's antisemitism.<ref>Ricks (1988), 54</ref> [[Anthony Julius]] argued in 1995 that Pound's use of the term ''suburban'' was the result of "an arrogance that broods on the descent from an ideal of greatness rather than on the injury which that descent did to others".<ref>Julius (1995), 185.</ref>}}

===Death===
[[File:Gravesite of Ezra Pound & Olga Rudge.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|alt=photograph|left|The graves of Pound and Olga Rudge at [[San Michele Cemetery, Venice|San Michele cemetery]] on the [[Isola di San Michele]]]]
Shortly before his death in 1972, an [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]] committee, which included his publisher James Laughlin, proposed that Pound be awarded the [[Emerson-Thoreau Medal]]. After a storm of protest, the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9.<ref>Tytell (1987), 337–338; Carpenter (1988), 908</ref> In the foreword of a [[Faber & Faber]] volume of his prose, he wrote in July: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE."<ref>Carpenter (1988), 909</ref>

On his 87th birthday, on 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the San Giovanni e Paolo Civil Hospital in Venice, where he died in his sleep on 1 November of "sudden [[intestinal blockage|blockage of the intestine]]".<ref>Carpenter (1988), 910</ref> Alerted by telegram, Dorothy Pound, who was living in a care home near Cambridge, England, requested a Protestant funeral in Venice. Telegrams were sent via American embassies in Rome and London, and the consulate in Milan, but Rudge would not change the plans she had already made for the morning of 3 November. Omar Pound flew to Venice as soon as he could, with Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber, but he arrived too late.<ref>Moody (2015), 487–488; Swift (2017), 244</ref> Four [[gondolier]]s dressed in black rowed Pound's body to Venice's municipal cemetery, the [[San Michele Cemetery, Venice|San Michele cemetery]], where, after a Protestant service, he was buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery, near [[Sergei Diaghilev|Diaghilev]] and [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]] who rest at the adjoining Orthodox section, with other non-Catholic Christians.<ref>Tytell (1987), 339; Carpenter (1988), 911; Cohassey (2014), 162; [https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/11/02/79477128.pdf "Ezra Pound Dies in Venice at Age of 87"]. ''The New York Times'', 2 November 1972.</ref> According to [[Hugh Kenner]], Pound had wanted to be buried in Idaho with his bust by [[Henri Gaudier-Brzeska]] on his grave.<ref>Kenner (1973), 259; Carpenter (1988), 911</ref> Dorothy Pound died in England the following year, aged 87. Olga Rudge died in 1996, aged 100, and was buried next to Pound.<ref name=Nadel2007p18/>