Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was one of the most influential and most difficult poets of the 20th century. His contributions to Modernist poetry are enormous: He was an early champion of a number of avant-garde and Modernist poets (including Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce), developed important channels of intellectual and aesthetic exchange between the United States and Europe, and contributed to important literary movements. Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. After the war he was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C..