In the late 1940s, a man sat caged in an outdoor steel pen near Pisa, sleeping on bare concrete and writing poetry on scraps of toilet paper. A few years later, those exact poems won one of America’s highest literary honors while he was locked in a federal asylum, ruled unfit to stand trial for treason.

This episode confronts the ultimate test case of genius and monstrosity. It maps how Ezra Pound built the modern literary landscape, editing T.S. Eliot and championing Joyce and Hemingway, then collapsed into fascist propaganda and antisemitism, forcing the uncomfortable question of whether we can ever separate the art from the artist.

• How imagism and his poem “In a Station of the Metro” rewired English poetry
• His role as the producer who halved The Waste Land and got Joyce published
• The wartime radio broadcasts for fascist Italy that led to a treason indictment
• Why the Bollingen Prize committee, including T.S. Eliot, awarded him to embarrass the Justice Department
• The double life inside St. Elizabeth’s, hosting literary giants while secretly writing racist articles and mentoring a Klansman