China and the West

In 1958 Ezra Pound had been released from St Elizabeths. Around 1960, he was entering a period of a confused, personal despair deeper than any he had lived through before, one produced perhaps by the combined shock of finding himself in a country, Italy, considerably altered by technology and events from the one he had left in 1945, and of finding himself, as if suddenly, old. The long period of silence that began about this time - "I did not enter into silence, silence captured me" – continued to his death in 1972. Pound was doubtful in this period about the wisdom of his faith in Confucianism, as he doubted perhaps all his former certainties. He doubted the effectiveness of adopting Confucianism as a platform from which to teach. He did resign from his lifelong, informal profession as teacher.
In 1962 Pound explained to James Laughlin, that he was silent 'because no one would listen to his economic ideas'.