A technical genius and pivotal figure in world poetry, Ezra Loomis Pound was the iconoclast of his day. A restless seeker and experimenter, he disdained his American roots, kept a ménage à trois with his wife and a mistress, and cultivated a bohemian image by dressing in scruffy, romantic splendor—cane, billowing cape, and tunic topped by rumpled hair and a saucy Van Dyke beard. On Paris’s fabled Left Bank, he kept company with expatriates Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein and counseled emerging writers of such stature and promise as Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, H. D., e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Amy Lowell. In addition to producing a formidable canon of verse, essay, criticism, biography, and translation, Pound stirred international controversy and led a re-evaluation of language and meaning in modern verse.
Pound was born in a cabin in the frontier town of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. He lived for a year in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and came of age in Wyncote outside Philadelphia, where his father was an assistant assayer for the U.S. Mint. Pound’s public schooling ended with enrollment at Cheltenham Military Academy. After entering the University of Pennsylvania at age 15, he knew that his life would consist of mastering all there was to know about poetry. He focused on Latin, Medieval, and Renaissance studies and formed a close friendship with fellow student William Carlos Williams, who lived for a time with the Pound family.
Pound completed a B.A. in philosophy from Hamilton College; he then taught romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an M.A. in Spanish. After a year on the faculty of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1905, he was fired for befriending a transsexual. Fleeing provincialism and artistic sterility, he toured southern Europe and researched a doctoral thesis on the plays of Lope de Vega. He earned what he could from reviewing and tutoring and worked as secretary for poet William Butler Yeats while championing “imagism,” his term for modern poetry.
In 1908, Pound published his first volumes, A Lume Spento [With Tapers Quenched], A Quinzaine for This Yule, and Personae [Masks]. Content to live outside his native land, in September 1909, he settled in a sparse front room in London’s Kensington section; five years later, he married Dorothy Shakespear. Under the influence of James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford, Pound rapidly produced Exultations in 1909 and Provença the following year. He covered new ground as poet-as-translator with The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), which he set to music for opera, and the verse of French troubadour François Villon. Pound’s translation of Li Po’s poems in Cathay (1915) and Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) anticipated a demand for Asian literature. A greater predictor of change was “In a Station of the Metro” (1916), Pound’s nineteen-syllable haiku that captures with impressionistic clarity the direction in which the poet intended his art to go.
Pound achieved his most influential imagism in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920), a collection of incisive poetic snapshots. During the post–World War I spiritual malaise, he joined Paris café society, a clamorous coterie known as the “lost generation.” In search of quiet, in 1922, he dropped his literary friends and migrated to Rapallo, Italy, his home for twenty years. He pored over medieval manuscripts and became Paris correspondent for The Dial, which conferred a $2,000 prize on him in 1928. A mark of his achievement in language was publication of Translations of Ezra Pound (1933) and the political critiques in ABC of Economics (1933) and Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935).
A racist, anti-Semite, and proponent of Hitler’s butchery and Mussolini’s Fascism, Pound supported the Italian government in short-wave broadcasts over Rome Radio that were addressed to the English-speaking world. In 1942, he repudiated democracy as “judeocracy” and declared American involvement in the war illegal. After the U.S. military arrested Pound in Genoa in May 1945, he was imprisoned outside Pisa for treason. After being returned to Washington, D.C., for trial, in February 1946, Pound escaped hard prison time by pleading insanity and senility. Critics accused him of perpetuating the pose of raving paranoic to avoid retrial and possible execution. Extolled as a modernist experimenter, he pursued an epic series, The Pisan Cantos (1948) and The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1948). In an atmosphere of jubilance and victory marred by virulent charges of fakery, he accepted the 1949 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, which included a $1,000 purse awarded by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress.
In 1958, Pound, then aged 72, gained release from an asylum through the intervention of an impressive list of colleagues, including Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Carl Sandburg, and T. S. Eliot. Freed of all charges, he returned to Italy. He continued writing and, without pausing to refine his work, published Thrones: Cantos 96–109 (1959) and Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1968). When he died on November 1, 1972, he was laid among exiles on the island of San Michele beneath a stone that bears only “Ezra Pound.”
