Ezra Pound, the genius poet and cultural iconocast who shocked and disturbed Americans with his pro-Fascist broadcasts during World War II, paid a very private visit to Rutherford 50 years ago, staying at the 9 Ridge Road residence of his life-long friend, William Carlos Williams.

Just several weeks before, Pound had been released from a Washington, D.C. mental hospital, where he’d been held without trial for 13 years on United States charges of treason. Following groundswell support and lobbying by literary figures like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and Williams, the charges were dismissed when Pound was declared incompetent to stand trial. He was permitted to seek a visa to enter Italy.

Pound and an entourage –his wife, Dorothy; attorney David Horton and wife; and Pound’s literary assistant, Marcella Spann, came to Rutherford and stayed at the Williams’ home, June 28 to June 30. Two days later, the then 72-year-old Pound and his wife left New York on an Italian liner en route to Genoa. He planned to live out his life at the Merano, Italian estate of his daughter, Mary, the wife of the noted Egyptologist, Prince Boris de Rachewiltz. A week later, Pound was ranting again when he reached Naples, greeting reporters with a Fascist salute.

No American could have been more disturbed by Pound’s broadcast rantings, against everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to the Jews, than Florence "Floss" Williams, who reported being "happy and relieved" when the Pounds left her home that hot June day in 1958. Seventeen years earlier, Flossie had raced home on a July morning to tell her husband that a Rutherford bank employee had listened to one of Pound’s broadcasts – via shortwave radio connection to Radio Rome. Between his innocuous musings and superlatives for the dictator, Benito Mussolini, Pound interjected, "As my friend Doc Williams of New Jersey would say..." Floss feared for her husband. And Williams just grew more incensed with his old college chum.

So why did Rutherford’s native poet extend a welcome to Pound? Among his most personal admissions, Williams would say things like, "I can’t write about Ezra Pound with any sort of composure." Their relationship was complex and sometimes inexplicable. Pound could be an intellectual bully. The kind that takes over the living room couch just when you’re trying to impress a convert, William said.

But to Williams, Pound was like a poet-brother who could give him a clear and truthful response. Even when Pound remained in a cell at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Williams sent him a draft advance copy of his memorial essay on the poet Wallace Stevens, published in the January 1956 issue of Poetry. To Williams, Pound was "one of the most competent poets in our language." And to that kind of standard, Williams was fiercely loyal.

Despite his self-imposed silence, Pound, who died in 1972, sent a condolence message received at 9 Ridge Road following Williams’ March 4, 1963 death. Pound’s cable from Italy was brief, but revealing: "For you he bore with me sixty years. I shall never find another poet friend like him."

- This article on Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams is based on research including the correspondence of Williams and Pound, as well as articles from The New York Times; William Carlos Williams, A New World Naked; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams; The Letters of Denise Levertov & William Carlos Williams; and The Early Politics and Poetics of William Carlos Williams.