ABSTRACT
From 1945 to 1958 Pound was in St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C. Both RockDrill and Thrones were composed there, although Thrones may have been added to or revised after his release in April 1958. Indications are, however, that the book was more or less in its present form before he left the hospital and returned to Italy. In St Elizabeths Pound was the victim of unusual circumstances. As soon as the young and not-so-young began to write to him from all corners of the world, as to a martyr, he took up again where he had left off in 1944. I will not dwell on the rubbish which we, his correspondents, fed to him, or the rubbish which he in turn fed to us. Some correspondents, I have no doubt, did better than this. But a good number of us, because we believed in him and (not least) sought his praise, helped to confirm him in the belief that he alone possessed a coherent view of the truth. It was his duty, therefore to hold out against The Enemy. I remember him speaking in all seriousness of the Cantos as a ‘political weapon’. The Enemy understood this, hence the efforts to silence him-and a great deal more along the same lines. This may help to show why, after the humanity and breadth of much of the Pisan section, the twenty-four cantos that follow are so false, pandering, as they do, to the poet’s self-esteem. No longer is he following his bent, but proving himself right. Human perhaps, but not in itself enough to produce poetry.
