Actually,
Pound was never jailed for
treason. A doctor who liked his works offered to certify him as
insane, escaping a possible
death penalty.
More? Okay.
Pound was the originator of modernist poetry. He often worked to exchange ideas between American and English poets--part of the way he tried to heal this rift is through supporting dozens of his contemporaries on both sides of the pond, like W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle (aka H.D.), James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and, duh, T. S. Eliot.
His major school of thought, if one could think of it, is imagism (descended from Chinese and Japanese classical poetry), a staple which, now a days, seems to define whether you write decently or not.
For nearly fifty years he worked on The Cantos, his epic and major work. Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. After college, he went to Europe and married Dorothy Shakespear (spelling is correct here), and he moved to Italy in 1924, where he started getting into Facism in a hardcore way, given radio speeches, etc. The whole shebang.
When he came back to the United States in '45, he was arrested and what I said in the first paragraph happens. He stayed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. After a bunch of writers wrote asking for his release, he was, and moved back to Italy, to Venice, where he died in 1972.
He edited The Waste Land, of course, and, from the actual manuscript copies I've seen, this was a very good thing, too. The original was, IMO, (hah!) too long and wordy.