On May 3, 1945, American soldiers took Ezra Pound into custody and began the process that would bring him by the end of the month to the Detention Training Center outside of Pisa. According to his several biographers, Pound had spent the preceding months engaged in various propagandistic activities on behalf of the fascist cause, as if completely ignorant of the events signaling its imminent demise. He even traveled to Salo (after a visit to his daughter Mary in Gais), where he met with the minister of foreign affairs for the puppet regime the Nazis had set up for Mussolini. Not only did he continue to write articles and pamphlets in support of the new government, he wrote letters to leading Salo officials and to Mussolini himself. He even went on the radio once more, this time in Milan, and wrote radio broadcasts for Milan radio even after he no longer was on the air himself. I sketch this “pre-Pisa” activity in order to underscore the depth of his commitment to Italian fascism in general, and to Mussolini in particular, right up to the moment of his arrest and internment in Pisa.

Mussolini was arrested and executed by Italian partisans in late April, and his body (as well as that of his mistress, Clara Petacci) was brought to Milan in the early hours of April 29, 1945, where they were hung by the feet from a scaffold in a brutal image of revenge. Only days later, on May 3, partisans arrested Pound and handed him over to American troops the following day. These two events – the very public death of Mussolini and Pound's more private incarceration – are nearly simultaneous, and they dominate the poems Pound writes while in custody at the Pisan Detention Training Center. In fact, the image of Mussolini's corpse famously opens these Cantos. For Pound, the death of Mussolini and the defeat of Italian fascism constitute “[t]he enormous tragedy of the dream” (lxxiv/445) and The Pisan Cantos may be read as the poet's attempt to continue his epic poem under radically new and enormously trying conditions.