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during the war, Pound had, on the advice of his lawyer, pleaded insanity rather than risk being tried for treason—and if convicted, executed—and had been confined since the end of 1945 to St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. (The government’s plan was to keep Pound there rather than risk an acquittal after a trial, so the fiction of his insanity was maintained by sympathetic psychiatrists.) During his first few years there he was allowed few visitors, but by 1951 his visiting privileges had been extended, as they would continue to be over the years. Surrounded by madmen and with the threat of being tried for treason hanging over his head should he “recover” from his insanity, Pound was understandably miserable and his creative drive at a standstill. The Pisan Cantos , written in 1945 while Pound was incarcerated in Italy, had been published in 1948, and he had written nothing since. In 1949 Pound won the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos , and the controversysurrounding the award attracted the attention of a new generation of readers, many of whom began making pilgrimages to St. Elizabeths in the 1950s to study under the master at his “Ezuversity” and do his bidding.
    Sheri wrote to Pound’s supervisor Dr. Overholser on 26 December 1951 to ask permission to visit him; her request was granted, and though there’s no record of their first meeting, the mutual attraction must have been immediate. Pound encouraged her to move down there and informally adopted her. She got a job working in the admissions office of George Washington University, which didn’t last long, and then worked in a waffle shop on K Street until Pound made her quit so that she could concentrate on her painting. He paid the rent on her apartment and gave her a dollar a day for expenses. Aged sixty-six and thirty-three, respectively, there was a father-daughter relationship at first (or older: she called him “Grampaw”). Pound was still married to Dorothy Shakespear, who had taken a small apartment near the hospital and visited him daily, but the older woman was apparently not jealous of the younger one; she even approved of Pound’s financial assistance to Sheri. In the summer of 1954, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey notes in his book The Roots of Treason , “Dorothy wrote to Dr. Overholser requesting that Sheri Martinelli be allowed to take her place as [Pound’s] guardian while out on the lawn because she had to go away for a week; Dorothy reassured Dr. Overholser that Ezra thought of Sheri as his own daughter.” The following year Pound asked Dr. Overholser whether Sheri could move onto the grounds of St. Elizabeths and work as an art therapist; both requests were denied. Dorothy too seems to have looked upon Sheri as a daughter; spotting Sheri walking up toward Pound and her, “Dorothy once commented, ‘Here comes “family.”’” Sheri proudly accompanied Dorothy on various outings in Washington, DC, dazzled by the older woman’s Edwardian elegance.
    Sheri lived in a variety of small apartments in and around Washington, DC, for the next seven years—once sharing a basement apartment with another Pound disciple named David Horton—and visited Pound almost daily. (She did, however, maintain a studio apartment on New York’s Lower East Side for occasional visits; after another disciple, John Kasper, moved to New York and opened his Make It New bookshop on Bleecker Street, Sheri used the store as a mailingaddress. She received more than a hundred letters from Pound during her periods away from St. Elizabeths.) She joined the growing number of young acolytes who visited Pound, listening to his pronunciamentos and undertaking various projects at his suggestion. Sheri could always be seen with sketchpad in hand, doing studies of the Maestro, and occasionally of Dorothy.
    Virtually everyone who has written about Pound’s life at St. Elizabeths mentions Sheri, in terms ranging from praise to bemusement to condemnation. Noel