Pound, Ezra (1885–1972)

views updated

POUND, EZRA (1885–1972)

American poet.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but moved with his family at the age of two to Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb. He completed his B.A. and an M.A. in Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, after teaching briefly in Indiana, he left for Europe. He spent a few months in Venice, then moved to London in 1908, where he was soon frequenting the salon of Olivia Shakespear, a close friend of William Butler Yeats, for Pound the greatest living poet. During the winter months in the period from 1913 to 1915, he would serve as a reader and amanuensis for Yeats, and the two developed a lifelong friendship, despite their very different aesthetic preferences.

In 1912 Pound founded imagism, a poetic movement that emphasized precision and conciseness. In earlier accounts of modernism, imagism was hailed as a major breakthrough that paved the way for the early writings of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. More recent critics have tempered these claims, stressing that Eliot and Joyce developed their aesthetics without reference to imagism and noting the extent to which imagism responded to futurism, yet did so in ways that evaded futurism's most challenging dimensions, such as its call for an aesthetics grounded in a systematic reading of social and economic modernity. Only two years later Pound joined with the painter Wyndham Lewis in founding vorticism, a more coherent and provocative movement, albeit one still indebted to futurism, as contemporaries immediately noted.

By 1915 Pound's interest was turning to Chinese poetry. Stimulated by the manuscripts of the Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa, he published Cathay, a book of translations that "created" Chinese poetry for English-speaking readers for the rest of the twentieth century. A year later he published Certain Noble Plays of Japan, an edited selection and reworking of Fenollosa's translations of Noh plays, and in 1918 he published "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry," a meditation by Fenollosa that helped Pound to articulate his own aesthetics of juxtaposition.

During the decade from 1912 to 1921, Pound was a tireless editor and cultural impresario. He was foreign editor for the journal Poetry from 1912 to 1914, literary advisor to The Egoist from 1914 to 1917, editor of an independent section within The Little Review from 1917 to 1919, and then foreign correspondent and talent scout for The Dial from 1920 to 1921. In these positions he championed the writings of Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. As a cultural impresario he linked together extant journals, potential patrons, and innovative authors, creating institutional venues open to avant-garde writing. To the extent that Anglo-American literary modernism was a viable institution as well as an ensemble of specific texts, it was largely Pound's creation.

In 1920 Pound published Hugh Swelwyn Mauberley, a long poetic sequence that has become a modern classic. That same year he moved from London to Paris, where he would reside until late 1924, his residence punctuated by increasingly frequent journeys to Italy. From now on his energies would be devoted to The Cantos, an epic poem that consumed the rest of his life. While in Paris in early 1922, he edited Eliot's The Waste Land, deleting more than two hundred lines and transforming it into the published poem. A year later, in January 1923, while traveling in Italy, he had his first experiences with Italian Fascists, and he soon counted himself an admirer of Benito Mussolini.

In late 1924 he moved to Rapallo, Italy. His commitments to Mussolini and fascism deepened in subsequent years, and during the 1930s they were wedded to increasingly virulent anti-Semitism. Both make their presence felt in the portions of The Cantos that he published during the 1930s. During World War II Pound made a series of radio broadcasts sponsored by the Italian state, and for these he was indicted for treason by the United States. At the war's end he was arrested and incarcerated in a prison camp for U.S. army criminals located near Pisa, and there he wrote the Pisan Cantos, another installment of The Cantos, published to acclaim and controversy in 1948. Pound, meanwhile, had been flown to Washington, D.C., to stand trial, but was declared mentally unfit and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane, where he stayed until 1958. After his release, he returned to Venice, where he passed his last years. He continued to publish more installments of The Cantos during these years, but only the final volume, Drafts and Fragments, has found a warm reception from critics and readers.

In the afterlife of critical discussion, Pound has been as controversial as he was during his lifetime. He left a divided legacy, one in which real achievement is mixed with tedious self-indulgence, and genuine generosity is counterbalanced by ugly anti-Semitism.

See alsoFascism; Lewis, Wyndham; Modernism.