Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

(Source: Pennsound)

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia. He was educated at Hamilton College and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied languages and became lifelong friends with the poet William Carlos Williams. In 1908 Pound moved to London, where he met the most prominent artists and writers of his day, including W. B Yeats, for whom he worked as secretary. He also championed the careers of such promising writers as Robert Frost, T. S Eliot, and James Joyce. Pound moved to Paris in 1920, and to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. In 1930 he met the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and began to write on economics and politics. During World War Ⅱ he made a series of pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts that culminated in an indictment for treason. Flown to the United States to stand trial, he was adjudged mentally unfit and sentenced to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C., where he remained until 1958. Upon his release he returned to Italy. In 1912, Pound, H. D., and Richard Aldington had launched imagism, a literary movement whose manifesto promised: “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 tin the sequence of a musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. ” Soon dissatisfied with a slackness he saw creeping into the imagist movement, and increasingly influenced by avant-grade visual artists such as Wyndlham Lewis, Pound moved on to vorticism, whose practitioners strove to depict dynamic energies rather than represent static images. In 1920, Pound’s attempts to modernize his work, to “make it new,” while preserving the best history had to offer, resulted in Hug Selywn Mauberley, whose foreign phrase, literary fragments, and abrupt shifts of scene anticipated Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which Pound edited masterfully. The crowning achievement of his career is the Cantos, which he began to write in earnest in 1924 but never finished to his satisfaction. Both turgid and brilliant, the Cantos are “a mosaic of images, ideas phrases-politics, ethics, economics-anecdotes, insults, denunciations-English, Greek, Italian, Provencal, Chinese,” and so on, which attack the corruption Pound thought endemic to modern civilization. The poems follow no easily discernible pattern or line of logic. According to Pound, however, “the forma, the immortal concetto,” or underlying organizing concept, is a dynamic one that might be compared to “the rose-pattern driven into the dead iron filings by the magnet.” (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)