Despite his behavior during the war and his blatant anti-Semitism, countless American poets visited Pound in the hospital, and his influence continued. In 1958, due to the intercession of a number of well-known poets (including Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and even Frost), Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's, and he set sail for Italy. As soon as he arrived, he gave a Fascist salute, called America 'an insane asylum,' and continued to mistreat his wife and avoid his son." Baer also describes how, in 1962, Pound said that he had been, "wrong, wrong, wrong. I've always been wrong." The following year, he claimed, "Everything I touch I spoil. I have blundered always." In 1966, Pound said that "The Cantos", the 803-page poem which he had begun writing down on toilet paper while imprisoned at Pisa, "doesn't make sense." Pound called the whole poem, "stupidity and ignorance." Pound also called his entire body of work, "a botch," and added, "I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that's not the way to make a work of art." In response, Baer commented, "Like Picasso, the founders of Imagism came to disavow their methods. It's a true story that, unfortunately, is not often told to young aspiring writers. Certainly, serious poetic artists need to experiment, but not all experiments are necessarily useful or permanent... Oddly enough, even now, after nearly a hundred years of "vers libre", the current "Random House Webster's" still defines poetry as 'literary work in metrical form' and prose as 'the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinct from poetry or verse." In a reference to Robert Frost's famous comparison of free verse to tennis played without a net, Baer concluded with the words, "Tennis anyone?" In a 2007 essay titled "Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist", A.E. Stallings wrote, "People debate over who gets to be in the church of the "Avant Garde" — who gets to be among the Elect, who gets to be in the Canon Outside the Canon. It is clearly a privilege, a badge of honor." Stallings added, however, that no one, herself included, wants to be dubbed a New Formalist, which she likened to the kiss of death.