Ezra Pound I INTRODUCTION Ezra Pound American writer, editor, and critic Ezra Pound s best-known work is the Cantos, a series of poems addressing a wide range of subjects, from the historical to the personal. Pound wrote the Cantos from 1915 to 1970. David Lees/Corbis Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet, critic, editor, and translator, considered one of the foremost American literary figures of the 20th century. Pound was a chief architect of English and American literary modernism, a movement characterized by experimentation in literary form and content,
exploration of the literary traditions of non-western and ancient cultures, and rejection of the traditions of the immediate past. As a poet, Pound experimented with various verse forms, from short poems focusing on concrete images to his epic masterpiece, the Cantos, a wide-ranging series of poems combining ancient and modern history with Pound s personal reflections and experiences. As a critic and editor, Pound discovered and encouraged many experimental authors, including Irish writer James Joyce, English poet T. S. Eliot, and American writers Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. As an essayist, he wrote manifestos establishing influential principles of style and theme. II EARLY LIFE Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. When he was still an infant, his family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania. By age 15, Pound had decided to become a poet, resolving that by the age of 30 he would know more about poetry than any man living. In 1901 he entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended the future poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle. After two years he transferred to Hamilton College in New York State, and he graduated in 1905. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies in Romance languages, earning his M.A. degree. Pound then taught languages for a brief time at Wabash College in Indiana. Deciding that there was no place in the United States for poets, Pound moved to Europe, living first in Venice, Italy. There he published his first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (1908; translated, 1965). Convinced that London was the place for poetry, he relocated there and worked as the secretary of Irish poet William Butler Yeats. During his time in London, Pound supported himself by writing and teaching. He also served as the London representative for two American literary journals, the Chicago-based Poetry magazine and the New York City-based The Little Review. On the lookout for writers who seemed dedicated to reinvigorating literature of the period or in his words, making it new he regularly sent some of the
era s finest poems to be published in Poetry, notably T. S. Eliot s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). Pound also edited early drafts of Eliot s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922). III DEVELOPMENT AS A POET In his own poetry and essays, Pound established principles that many modernist writers would follow. Detesting what he called emotional slither, he demanded a harder and saner poetry that was nearer the bone than traditional verse, with fewer painte d adjectives impeding the shock of it. He warned poets, Go in fear of abstraction. What was needed was direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective, and rhythm that was in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. In about 1909 Pound became the founder and, for a time, the leader of the school of poetry called imagism, featuring succinct verse which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound s own poetry of this period appeared in such volumes as Personae (1910), Cathay (1915), and Lustra (1916). American poet Amy Lowell eventually assumed leadership of the imagist movement, and Pound moved on to the vorticism movement. Along with British artist and writer Wyndham Lew is, Pound attempted to invest dynamic energy in the poetic image, which he said was not an idea but a radiant node or cluster a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly flowing. Pound considered the restoration of sophistication and historical richness to literature as a necessary and integral part of his commitment to innovation. As a result he had a mixed view of American poet Walt Whitman, whom he admired for his experimental style but disliked for what he considered Whitman s lack of interest in cultural matters beyond America, and for his very infatuation with an America that had disappointed Pound. In such poems as A Pact (1916), Pound paid grudging respect to Whitman, calling him a pig-headed father but adding, It was you that broke the new wood, / Now it is time for the carving. Part of this symbolic carving of a new literary tradition was the use of
poetic devices from foreign languages. To this end, Pound extensively translated poetry from the Provençal, Japanese, and Chinese languages. Around 1914, Pound conceived of a poetry sequence that would possess the sweep of Whitman s major volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass (1855; numerous revised editions), but would use modernist devices. The result was the Cantos. Written from 1915 to 1970, the Cantos eventually totaled 116 poems. Written in what Pound called the ideogrammatic method, featuring unexpected juxtapositions and associations, the various Cantos combined reminiscence, meditation, and allusions to many cultures, including Renaissance Italy, dynastic China, and 18th-century America. Often difficult to understand, the Cantos are endlessly debated by scholars and are widely regarded as the 20th century s closest approximation to a modern poetic epic. IV POLITICAL ALIENATION The devastation caused by World War I (1914-1918) deepened Pound s disillusion with the West, which he labeled a botched civilization. His bitterness was visible in his satirical volume Hugh Selwyn Mauberly: Life and Contacts (1920), which describes the tawdry cheapness and deterioration of a modern America Pound called a half-savage country. Believing that capitalism marginalized or excluded poets, Pound sought countries that he felt were more hospitable and left England in 1920. He moved first to France and then to Italy, where in 1925 he settled in the village of Rappallo. Pound saw Italy s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as a potential savior of the world from capitalism. In 1933 he met Mussolini, who praised his poetry. Pound became an active supporter of fascism, promoting it on radio broadcasts to England and the United States during World War II (1939-1945). In anticapitalist and anti-semitic speeches, Pound denounced those he held responsible for the West s decline in particular, Jewish bankers. When the Allied troops occupied Italy in 1945 near the end of World War II, Pound was imprisoned for weeks in an open-air cage. After being transferred to a medical tent, he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1948), which consist of ten sections describing the prison, its environment, and its inhabitants. Because of their vivid imagery and unity as a whole, these poems are regarded by some as his finest
poems. In 1946 Pound was taken to Washington, D.C., to be tried for treason. His trial was canceled after he was declared legally insane, and he entered a hospital for the criminally insane, where he continued to write and to receive visitors. In 1949 Pound s Pisan Cantos won the first annual Library of Congress Bollingen Award for Poetry, reopening the debate over his literary stature. Strongly defended by several prominent writers, including Hemingway, Frost, and Archibald MacLeish, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to Italy. Pound spent his final years in se lfimposed literary silence, leaving the Cantos incomplete. Despite the reprehensible politics of his later life, Pound was an important poet and literary innovator who forged the way to modernism while retaining an allegiance to literary tradition. Editio ns of Pound s writings include Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937), The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1950), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954), Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (1976), and Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology (1970). Contributed By: David Reynolds