"This story of Pound's politics and his prejudices takes on fresh significance.Swift is an alert and eloquent guide.I guarantee that The Bughouse will vex you into thinking more deeply about the relation between an artist's life and work, and perhaps even about the old-fashioned question of moral responsibility." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "[ The Bughouse ] abounds in striking details." -- The New Yorker "Engrossing . immensely fascinating." -- Diego Baez, Booklist "A sensitive investigation into the enigmatic, prodigious mind of poet Ezra Pound . [Daniel Swift] draws on memoirs .

as well as interviews, a close reading of Pound's writings, and medical records to create a multidimensional portrait of a celebrated, controversial literary figure." -- Kirkus Reviews " The Bughouse is an extraordinary book of real, passionate research that keeps surprising and illuminating by turns. It has made my love of Pound far more difficult--as it should." --Edmund de Waal "'Pound,' he quipped of his name, 'an enclosure for stray animals.' Swift tells the stories of six poets (although there were many more) who were gathered by Uncle Ez into his pen at St. Elizabeths. Hospitalized Pound here emerges as the uncanny figure of the hospes , at once stranger, guest, and host, at once a welcoming organism and a dangerous, parasitical virus." --Richard Sieburth, author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont "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, author of The Savage God.