Daniel Swift teaches at the New College of the Humanities in London. His first book, Bomber County, was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Statesman, and Harper's Magazine.
"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
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