Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and a major figure of the early Modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry to stress clarity, precision and economy of language. From 1912 until the mid-1920s he lived in London and Paris, vigorously promoting the work of the best known modernist writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, visual artists including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and musicians including George Antheil. His later work, covering nearly fifty years, centers on his epic poem The Cantos.
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and grew up in suburban Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He studied classical literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. In 1908 he moved to London where he lived until 1921 before relocating… read more
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and a major figure of the early Modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry to stress clarity, precision and economy of language. From 1912 until the mid-1920s he lived in London and Paris, vigorously promoting the work of the best known modernist writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, visual artists including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and musicians including George Antheil. His later work, covering nearly fifty years, centers on his epic poem The Cantos.
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and grew up in suburban Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He studied classical literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. In 1908 he moved to London where he lived until 1921 before relocating to Paris. During those years his work included the poemsHugh Selwyn Mauberley, as well as articles in The New Age magazines and translations of medieval writers such as Guido Cavalcanti and Ernest Fenollosa. He moved to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924 where he lived for much of the rest of his life. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914; she gave birth to a son, Omar, in 1926. For most of his married life he was romantically involved with the classical violinist Olga Rudge with whom he had a daughter, Mary, in 1925.
After World War I Pound became interested in the theory of social credit, which he promoted aggressively during the 1930s. At the same time he attempted to prevent the United States from entering World War II, and promoted Benito Mussolini’s version of fascism. Between 1940 and 1942 he made a series of antisemitic radio addresses from Rome in which he criticized America and supported the policies of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Following his arrest for treason in 1945, he spent almost six months in a detention center in Pisa. For 25 days he was kept in a steel cage, where he suffered a nervous breakdown. During this period he began work on his Pisan Cantos, for which he controversially won the Bollingen Prize. On his return to the United States he was incarcerated at the St. Elizabeths Hospital until 1958. Following his release Pound lived in Italy until his death. He continued to work on The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.
In the early 1970s, literary critic Hugh Kenner published a book titled The Pound Era, ranking Pound as the most influential poet of the early 20th century. Despite Kenner’s attempt to resurrect Pound’s reputation based on the theory of new criticism, Pound is the most controversial American poet of the 20th century due to his antisemitism, support of Hitler and Mussolini and the charges of treason. Pound died in Italy on 1 November 1972. —wikipedia
