Ezra Caged

BBC Radio 4's Poet in Residence, Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's radio poetry archive with Ezra Caged.

Jeremy Harding reads and explores the Pisan Cantos, the poems written by the American Modernist poet Ezra Pound during his time in prison in Italy at the end of the Second World War.

He had been arrested towards the end of the war after making pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts, and for a time was held in a wire cage at a detention camp near Pisa. It was in these conditions that he drafted what have gone on to be regarded as the finest section of his long Cantos sequence.

Producer: Tim Dee

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2008.