Pound, Ezra (1885-1972), was an American poet and essayist. He became one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the 1900’s.
Disillusioned with what he considered the artistic backwardness of the United States, Pound left the country in 1908. He lived in Venice, London, Paris, and, finally, Rapallo, Italy. He became the friend and critic of Irish writers William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. Pound also helped such then-unknown poets as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost.
Pound’s early work reflects his conviction that the poet must play a vital role in the culture of the time. In his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), Pound revealed his anger at the slaughter during World War I (1914-1918) and his despairing sense of the failure of art to affect the course of history.
Pound spent the last 50 years of his life composing a never-completed, 800-page poem called The Cantos. In the first section, Pound traced the rise and fall of Western and Eastern civilizations, emphasizing the conflict between artistic spirit and materialistic greed. The Cantos that were written during the late 1920’s and the 1930’s deal with the economic and political corruption Pound saw developing since the time of two of his heroes, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Pound’s indignation rapidly turned to anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Pound became an admirer of the Fascist rule of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. During World War II (1939-1945), Pound broadcast Fascist propaganda to the United States. In 1945, the U.S. government arrested Pound for treason. While imprisoned at a U.S. Army camp in Pisa, Italy, Pound wrote some of his most moving and self-critical verses, the Pisan Cantos. In 1946, Pound was judged insane and spent 12 years in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he died on Nov. 1, 1972.
Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on Oct. 30, 1885. He died on Nov. 1, 1972. His criticism was collected in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) and Selected Prose 1909-1965 (1973). Two major collections of his poetry and translations were published after his death. They were Poems and Translations (2003) and New Selected Poems and Translations (2010).
See also American literature (Modernist poetry); “In a Station of the Metro; Lost Generation.
