Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound—genius, anti-Semite, author of Cantos, Translations, Personae and “Jefferson & Mussolini”—singlehandedly forced Modernism into vaudeville USA, spun language on ear, cut words to bone, edited T.S. Eliot until he said “Truth.” Imagism, No Idea But In Things, stripped the bride bare, the bachelors even. Others on the Scene thanks to Pound: Yeats, Frost, Williams, Moore, HD, Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot.... But now Pound is known for the contradictions of a poet’s life, his fascist/anti-Semitic beliefs his arrest as a traitor and his days in St. Elizabeths Mental Hospital.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in 1885 in the Idaho Territory and grew up in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, attending several Quaker primary schools and then Cheltenham Military Academy as a teenager. Even as a child he knew that he wanted to be a poet—his first published poem was a limerick written about William Jennings Bryan and printed in the local newspaper when he was 11. Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15, resolved to learn everything there was to know about poetry, its languages and translation. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Hamilton College, his MA at Penn, and taught Romance languages at Wabash College.

Pound was always an independent (even cranky) thinker and scholar, and he didn’t get along well in conservative academia as either a Ph.D. student or a young professor. He had toured Europe a couple of times in his youth, and returned in 1908 as an expatriate, living for a short time in Italy and then settling in London, where he stayed off-and-on for 12 years. During those years, he befriended William Butler Yeats, published books of translations, criticism and poems that made his literary reputation, met and married Dorothy Shakespear, and fostered the careers of other Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.

Pound was a pioneer of poetic translation—though his work was often subject to traditional scholarly translators’ disdain for its linguistic “errors,” his translations are actually re-imaginings, poems on their own. His fascination with Japanese and Chinese poetry began when he was given the unpublished notes of Professor Ernest Fenollosa after his death, and his work with Fenollosa’s papers resulted in the publication of Cathay in 1915, and Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa in 1920.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Pound had met Hilda Doolittle, and she followed him to London in 1911. There she met and married the poet Richard Aldington, and for a time the three lived as neighbors in the same street. The three tenets of Imagism first appeared in the March 1913 issue of Poetry under the name F.S. Flint, which Pound later claimed was a pseudonym for their collaboration. All in the service of clarity and simplicity, they are:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Pound edited the first anthology of Imagist poets in 1914, but after Amy Lowell showed up in London and jumped enthusiastically into promoting the Imagist movement, Pound distanced himself from Imagism (which he now called “Amygism”).

The Pounds lived in Paris from 1921 - 1924, then settled in Rapallo, Italy, where they lived through the end of World War II. It was here that Pound worked on his epic Cantos and also began his turn towards Fascism. He wrote anti-Semitic essays blaming the Jews for both World Wars, and recorded many radio programs criticizing the US and President Franklin Roosevelt. For these he was indicted as a traitor in absentia in 1943, and soon after Germany surrendered he was imprisoned and then returned to the US. After a legal campaign to have him declared insane, he was kept at St. Elizabeths Hospital until 1958.

In 1948, while he was at St. Elizabeths, Pound published his Pisan Cantos and was awarded the first Bollingen Prize—an award that aroused a big ruckus of debate between those (including several supporters who were on the Prize committee) who thought his literary genius should be a reason to release him, and those who believed poetic brilliance was no excuse for the abhorrence of his ideas. When he was released in 1958, he and Dorothy returned to Rapallo. Pound died in Venice in 1972, being cared for by Olga Rudge, his mistress over a span of 50 years and the mother of one of his two children.