By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved on to Paris, and in 1924, to the Italian seaside town of Rapallo, fifteen miles southeast of Genoa. A virulent anti-Semite, Pound became an ardent and vocal supporter of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism.