Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972), was an American poet and critic who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement in a mental institution.
Pound was born in a small mining town in Idaho. About 1887 the family moved to settled in nearby Pennsylvania, where Pound lived a typical middle-class childhood.
After two years at Cheltenham Military Academy, which he left without graduating, he attended a local high school. From there he went for two years (1901–03) to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. He took a bachelor of philosophy degree at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, in 1905 and returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work. He received an M.A. in June 1906 but withdrew from the university after working one more year toward his doctorate. He left with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English literature and grammar.
In the autumn of 1907, Pound became professor of Romance languages at Wabash Presbyterian College, Crawfordsville, Indiana. Although his general behavior fairly reflected his Presbyterian upbringing, he was already writing poetry and was affecting a bohemian manner. His career came quickly to an end, and in February 1908, with light luggage and the manuscript of a book of poems that had been rejected by at least one American publisher, he set sail for Europe.
With little money, he then sailed to Venice, where in June 1908 he published, at his own expense, his first book of poems, A lume spento (“With Tapers Quenched’). In September 1908 he went to London, where he was befriended by the writer and editor Ford Madox Ford (who published Pound’s work in his English Review), entered William Butler Yeats’s circle, and joined the “school of images,” a modern group presided over by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.
In England, success came quickly to Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was published in April 1909; a second book, Exultations, followed in October; and a third book, The Spirit of Romance, based on lectures delivered in London (1909–10), was published in 1910.
After a trip home—a last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make a literary life for himself in Philadelphia or New York City—he returned to Europe in February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany, and France.
In 1912 Pound became London correspondent for the small magazine Poetry ; he did much to enhance the magazine’s importance. He was among the first to recognize and review the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence. As leader of the Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor of the “school of images,” he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914).
Though his friend Yeats had already become famous, Pound succeeded in persuading him to adopt a new, leaner style of poetic composition. In 1914, he began a collaboration with the then-unknown James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The Egoist (London) and later as London editor of The Little Review , he saw to the publication of Joyce’s novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading Joyce’s name and securing financial assistance for him. In that same year he gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his career as poet and critic.
During his 12 years in London, Pound had completely transformed himself as a poet. He had arrived a Late Victorian for whom love was a matter of “lute strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales that blind me.” Within five or six years he was writing a new, adult poetry that spoke calmly of current concerns in common speech. In this drier intellectual air, “as clear as metal,” Pound’s verse took on new. Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past.
Unsettled by the slaughter of World War I and the spirit of hopelessness he felt was pervading England after its conclusion, Pound decided to move to Paris, publishing before he left two of his most important poetical works,
During his stay in Paris (1921–24) Pound met and helped the young American novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an opera, Le Testament, based on poems of François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot with the editing of his long poem The Waste Land; and acted as correspondent for the New York literary journal The Dial.
In 1924 Pound tired of Paris and moved to Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a daughter, Maria, by the expatriate American violinist Olga Rudge, and in 1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a son, Omar. The daughter was brought up by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol, the son by relatives in England. In 1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine, Exile, and in 1930 he brought together various segments of his ambitious long poem The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.
The 1930s saw the publication of further volumes of The Cantos. A growing interest in music caused him to arrange a long series of concerts in Rapallo during the 1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga Rudge, he played a large part in the rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi.
Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, he turned more and more to history and economics. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars. He became obsessed with monetary reform, involved himself in politics, and declared his admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini . The obsession affected his Cantos, which even earlier had shown evidence of becoming an uncontrolled series of personal and historical episodes.
As war in Europe drew near in 1939, Pound returned home in the hope that he could help keep the peace between Italy and the United States. He went back to Italy a disappointed man, and between 1941 and 1943, after Italy and the United States were at war, he made several hundred broadcasts over Rome Radio on subjects ranging from James Joyce to the control of money and the U.S. government by Jewish bankers and often openly condemned the American war effort.
He was arrested by U.S. forces in 1945 and spent six months in a prison camp for army criminals near Pisa. Despite harsh conditions there, he translated Confucius into English and wrote The Pisan Cantos, the most moving section of his long poem-in-progress.
He returned to the United States to face trial for treason, and he was pronounced “insane and mentally unfit for trial” by a panel of doctors. He spent 12 years (1946–58) in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. During this time he continued to write The Cantos , translated ancient Chinese poetry, received visitors regularly, and kept up a voluminous and worldwide correspondence.
Controversy surrounding him burst out anew when, in 1949, he was awarded the important Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. When on April 18, 1958, he was declared unfit to stand trial and the charges against him were dropped, he was released from Saint Elizabeth’s and returned to Italy
Pound lapsed into silence in 1960, leaving The Cantos unfinished. More than 800 pages long, they are fragmentary and formless despite recurring themes and ideas. The Cantos are the logbook of Pound’s own private voyage through Greek mythology, ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many other periods and subjects, including economics and banking and the nooks and crannies of his own memory and experience.
Pound even convinced himself that the poem’s faults and weaknesses, inevitable from the nature of the undertaking, were part of an underlying method. Yet there are numerous passages such as only he could have written that are among the best of the century.
Pound died in Venice in 1972.