Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American avant-garde poet, critic, and translator, who exerted an enormous influence on the development of English and American poetry and criticism in the early 20th century.

Pound was born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend William Carlos Williams, and Hamilton College. He went abroad in 1907 and from 1908 until 1930 lived in London, where he served as a foreign correspondent for the American magazines Poetry and The Little Review. Pound championed and in some cases edited the works of T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and other avant-garde authors writing in England. He was among the first to recognize and review the poetry of Robert Frost and D. H. Lawrence. He also set forth the theories behind the literary movement that came to be known as Imagism.

Pound's literary reputation was established very early in Britain, with the publication of Personae, a verse collection, in 1909. In 1920 Pound moved to Paris, where he became a leader of the American expatriate literary circle that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He also worked for the American literary magazine The Dial; translated from Italian, Chinese, and Japanese literature; and completed several books of criticism and poetry, including Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920). In 1924 he settled in Rapallo, Italy where he continued the work he had begun in 1915 on “The Cantos”. During World War II he broadcast Fascist propaganda from Rome to the United States. He was arrested by the Americans in 1945, declared psychologically unfit to stand trial for treason, and confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. On his release in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he died on November 1, 1972, in Venice.

Portions of Pound's major work, Cantos, were first published in 1925; the first complete English edition of all the published segments was issued in 1970 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Pound drew his themes from Confucian ethics, classical mythology, economic theory, and other seemingly disparate sources in his effort to interpret cultural history. His Letters and his Collected Poems were both published in 1950. His Literary Essays appeared in 1954 and Translations in 1963.