Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet, musician, and critic who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early- to mid-20th-century poetry. He was the driving force behind several Modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).
Pound was born in Hailey, then a part of the Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948), who married in 1884. Homer was employed as the Registrar of the General Land Office in Hailey, with Thaddeus Coleman Pound (Ezra Pound's paternal grandfather) securing the appointment. Isabel, who was from New York, could not adjust to life in Hailey and went back there in 1887, taking the 18-month-old Ezra with her; Homer followed later and took up a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint.
Pound began his education in dame schools, then attended Wyncote Public School in 1894. During his time there, he made his first publication on November 7, 1896, a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had lost the presidential election that took place four days before running as a Democrat/Populist. He transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy in 1897, where he was taught drilling and how to shoot. The following year, his mother and aunt took him on a tour of Europe, visiting England, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.
In 1901, Pound attended the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts. During that time, he met his lifelong friends, fellow poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle.
In 1908 he set off for Europe and published A Lume Spento, his first collection of poetry. He soon followed with other publications, like Exultations (1909), Canzoni (1911), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1917–1962). These publications made him a major figure in the modernist movement in poetry and developed Imagism, which stressed precision and economy of language. He also helped discover and shape the works of contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.
In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear. In 1924, he moved to Italy. Through the 1930s and 1940s, he promoted the economic theory of social credit
and became engaged in Fascist politics. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made radio broadcasts attacking the United States, international finance, and Jews, among others, as causes, abettors, and prolongers of the war, and was arrested for treason in 1945. He was declared mentally ill and committed to St Elisabeths Hospital in Washington D.C., where he was held for over a dozen years.
While in custody in Italy, Pound worked on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948). He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, which stirred enormous controversy. After a lengthy campaign by fellow writers and his publisher James Laughlin, he was released in 1958, returned to Italy, settled in Venice and into near complete silence, and died on November 1, 1972. He was buried in the San Michele cemetery.
Pound is one of the major figures in the modernist movement in poetry, but his political and economic views ensured that his life and work remain controversial.
Major Works:
- A Lume Spento (1908): His first collection of poetry, self-published in Venice.
- A Quinzaine for This Yule (1908): Another poetry collection. The word "quinzaine" is an archaic word referring to the fifteenth day after a feast day, or a verse with fifteen syllables.
- Personae (1909): This is a collection of Pound's shorter poetry, which he thought was representative of the modernist movement in literature.
- Exultations (1909)
- Canzoni (1911)
- Ripostes (1912): A collection of twenty-five poems, signaling the economy of language and precise imagery of Imagism. He even used the word "imagiste" for the first time in this collection.
- Cathay (1915): A collection of loose translations of fifteen Chinese poems, alongside his translation of "The Seafarer", an Old English poem. Due to Pound's very limited knowledge of the Chinese language, he relied extensively on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, and the poems produced are less strict translations and more of recreated poems in their own right. The poems were reprinted in Lustra without "The Seafarer" but with for more Chinese poems derived from Fenollosa's notes.
- Lustra (1916–1917)
- The Cantos (1917–1962): A lengthy modernist poem, divided into 116 cantos and four fragments.
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
- Translations of Confucius
- The Great Digest (1928): Pound's translation of Daxue (大學), traditionally translated as The Great Learning
- The Unwobbling Pivot (1947): His translation of Zhongyong (中庸), traditionally translated as The Doctrine of the Mean
- The Analects (1950): His translation of Lunyu (論語).