| Sumario: | Ezra Pound and Nazim Hikmet, quintessential modernist poets, share similarities as striking as their differences. Both poets were charged with treason and incarcerated for long periods because of their radical ideologies—fascism and communism, respectively. This essay focuses on modernist poetry at the intersections of formal revolutions in poetic techniques, radical politics, and state curtailment of the rights of free speech. I trace the complicated relationship between poetry and the state, and the effect of incarceration on the formal redirection of the two poets' work while they were in prison, where they produced what is generally considered to be their best work.
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