… you are almost certainly a literate person with an interest in history. And this man was a lot more than brilliant and merely batschlit crazy (though he was very likely that, since he certifiably popped most of his buttons between the World Wars of the last century). He was also extremely influential, impacting for better or worse many who were born  in the pre-google age, even those who rightly abhor his political opinions.

He helped “discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“, and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by [him] would be “like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold…

“Angered by the carnage of World War I, [he]  blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called “usury”. He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini’s fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler.

“During World War II, [he] recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the fascist Italian government and its later incarnation as a German puppet state, in which he attacked the United States federal government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers, arms dealers, Jews, and others, as abettors and prolongers of the war. He also praised both eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy, while urging American GIs to throw down their rifles and surrender. In 1945, [he] was captured by the Italian Resistance and handed over to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, who held him pending extradition and prosecution based on an indictment for treason. He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage.

“A group of [his] friends—T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell—met … in June 1948 to discuss how to get [him] released. They planned to have him awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national [arts] award with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.

“Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, [he] was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed [him] as a narcissist and a psychopath…”*

So who was this famous man? See: Modernism and Imagism…

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* Where else? Wikipedia.