Some Poems
Biography
Videos
Books
Ezra Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972)
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a
major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became known
for his role in developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and
Georgian poets, favored tight language, unadorned imagery, and a strong
correspondence between the verbal and musical qualities of the verse and
the mood it expressed. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos,
which consumed his middle and late career, and was published between
1917 and 1969.
Early Life
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis
Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948). Both parents'
ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's
side, John Pound, a Quaker, sailed from England around 1650. His
grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound (1832–1914), was a retired
Republican Congressman for north-west Wisconsin who had made and lost a
fortune in the lumber business. His son Homer, Pound's father, had worked
for Thaddeus until Thaddeus secured him an appointment as Register of the
Government Land Office in Hailey.
On his mother's side Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a
Puritan who emigrated from England to Boston on the Lion in 1632. The
Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York, and Harding Weston and
Mary Parker produced Isabel Weston, Pound's mother. Harding apparently
spent most of his life without work, so his brother, Ezra Weston and his wife,
Frances, looked after Mary and Isabel.
Isabel was unhappy living in Hailey, and when her son was 18 months old
she left with him to go back East. Homer followed them, and in 1889 Homer
took a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to 417
Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, then in July 1893 bought a
six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in the town of Wyncote,
Pennsylvania.
Education
Pound's early education took place in a series of so-called dame schools,
some of them run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892;
the Misses Heacock's Chelten Hills school in Wyncote in 1893; and the
Florence Ridpath school from 1894, which became the Wyncote Public School
a year later. From 1898 until 1900 he attended the Cheltenham Military
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Academy, where the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms, and were taught
military drilling, how to shoot, and the importance of submitting to authority.
Pound was clever, independent-minded, conceited, and unpopular.
He knew early on that he wanted to be a poet. His first publication was on 7
November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a limerick about an
American politician, William Jennings Bryan—by E.L. Pound, Wyncote, Aged
11 years: "There was a young man from the West, / He did what he could for
what he thought best." His first trip overseas came two years later when he
was 13, a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and Aunt Frances,
who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He was
admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts in 1901 at
the age of 15:
I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man
living, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part
of poetry was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by translation
and—scarcely less important—what effects were obtainable in one language
only and were utterly incapable of being translated.
In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read
Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every University regulation and every
professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered
me with "requirements for degrees."
He met Hilda Doolittle at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the
daughter of the professor of astronomy, and later became known as the poet
H.D. Doolittle wrote that she felt her life was irrevocably intertwined with
Pound's; she followed him to Europe in 1908, leaving her family, friends, and
country for little benefit to herself, and became involved with Pound in
developing the "Imagisme" movement in London. He asked her to marry him
in the summer of 1907, though her father refused permission, and wrote
several poems for her between 1905 and 1907, 25 of which he hand-bound
and called "Hilda's Book". He was seeing two other women at the same
time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry,
Personae (1909), to the latter. He asked Mary to marry him that summer
too, but she turned him down
His parents and Frances Weston took him on another three-month European
tour in 1902, after which he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New
York—possibly because of poor grades—where he studied the Provençal
dialect with William Pierce Shephard, and Old English with Joseph D.
Ibbotson. David Moody writes that it was at Hamilton with Shephard that he
read Dante, and out of the discussions emerged the idea for a long poem in
three parts—dealing with emotion, instruction, and contemplation—which
planted the seed for The Cantos. He graduated with a BPhil in 1905, then
studied Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert at the University of
Pennsylvania, obtaining his MA in the spring of 1906. He registered as a PhD
student to write a thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays, and was
awarded a Harrison fellowship and a travel grant of $500, which he used to
visit Europe again. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries,
including one in the royal palace; he was actually standing outside the palace
during the attempted assassination on 31 May 1906 by anarchists of King
Alfonso, and left the country for fear he would be identified with them. He
moved on to Paris, spending two weeks in lectures at the Sorbonne, followed
by a week in London.
He returned to the U.S. in July, and his first essay, Raphaelite Latin, was
published in Book News Monthly in September. In 1907, at the university he
apparently annoyed Felix Schelling, the head of English, with silly remarks
during lectures—which included insisting that George Bernard Shaw was
better than Shakespeare, and taking out an enormous tin watch and winding
it with slow precision—and his fellowship was not renewed at the end of the
year. Moreover Schelling told Pound he was wasting his own time and that of
the institution; Pound abandoned his dissertation and left without finishing
his doctorate.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Teaching
In the fall of 1907 he took a job as a teacher of Romance languages at
Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a conservative town that he called
the sixth circle of hell, with an equally conservative college from which he
was dismissed after deliberately provoking the college authorities. Smoking
was forbidden, so he would smoke cigarillos in his office down the corridor
from the President's. He annoyed his landlords by entertaining friends,
including women, and was forced to move from one house after "[t]wo
stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with a lady gent
impersonator in my privut apartments," as he told a friend. He was
eventually caught in flagrante, although the details remain unclear and he
denied any wrongdoing. The incident involved a stranded chorus girl to
whom he offered tea and his bed for the night when she was caught in a
snowstorm; when she was discovered the next morning by the landladies,
Misses Ida and Belle Hall, his insistence that he had slept on the floor was
met with disbelief, and he was asked to leave the college. Glad to be free of
the place he left for Europe soon after.
London (1908-1920)
He returned to Europe in the spring, arriving in Gibraltar in April with $80 in
his pocket, but during the next few months earned money as a guide to
American tourists. He sent poems to Harper's Magazine and began writing
fiction that he hoped he could sell, and by the summer was in Venice, living
over a bakery near the San Vio bridge. In July he self-published his first book
of poetry, the 72-page A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent), which sold 100
copies at six cents each. The London Evening Standard called it "wild and
haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative." The title was from
the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, alluding to both the excommunicate
Manfred's death, and to that of his friend, the Philadelphia artist William
Brooke Smith, who died of consumption in his 20s.
In August he moved to London, where he ended up staying almost
continuously for 12 years. He wanted to meet W.B. Yeats, the greatest living
poet in Pound's view, and they became close friends, although Yeats was
older by 20 years. He had sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats
had replied that he found it charming. Pound told William Carlos Williams, a
friend from university: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."
English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Lord
Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous,
and propagandistic—popular with the public. James Knapp writes that Pound
wanted to focus on the individual experience, the particular, the concrete,
and rejected the idea of poetry as versified moral essay.
Arriving in the city with £3, he rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the
West End, then at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street, just a
penny bus-ride from the British Museum. The house (see right) sat across an
alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance decades later
in the Pisan Cantos, "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger
unnamed / az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub".
He persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews—publisher of Yeats's Wind
Among the Reeds and the Book of the Rhymer's Club—to display A Lume
Spento, and by October 1908 he was being discussed around town. In
December he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for This Yule, and
after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic he managed to
acquire a position lecturing in the evenings from January to February 1909
on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe".
He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, followed
by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street. Ford Madox Ford described
him, apparently tongue-in-cheek, as "approach[ with the step of a dancer,
making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear
trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie
hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard
cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae
He met the novelist Olivia Shakespear—Yeats's former lover and the subject
of his The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love—at a literary salon in January
1909, and was invited to attend her Tuesday salons where he was introduced
to Dorothy, Olivia's daughter, who became his wife in 1914. Through Olivia
Shakespear he was introduced to Yeats, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
Wyndham Lewis, and the rest of London's literary circle. Another patron was
the American heiress Margaret Lanier Cravens (1881–1912), who after
knowing him a short time offered him a large annual sum to allow him to
focus on his work. Cravens killed herself in 1912, probably because the
pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, married someone
else, but possibly also because she learned of Pound's engagement to
Dorothy.
In June 1909 another collection, Personae, was published by Mathews, his
first publication to have any commercial success. It was reviewed by The
Daily Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement among others; they said
it was full of passion and magic. Rupert Brooke gave a negative review in
The Cambridge Review, complaining that Pound had fallen under the
influence of Walt Whitman by writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths". In
September another 27 poems appeared as Exultations, dedicated to Carlos
Tracey Chester who had published his essay in Book News Monthly in 1906.
Around the same time he moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off
Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.[23] His
first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, was published in 1910,
based on his lectures at the polytechnic; others included Instigations (1920),
Indiscretions (1923), "How to Read" (1931), The ABC of Reading (1934),
Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937), and Guide to Kulchur (1938).
In June 1910 he returned to the United States for eight months, in part to
persuade the New York Public Library, then being built, to change its design.
The New York Times wrote that he almost daily visited the architects' offices
to shout at them.
His essays on America were written during this period, and were compiled
as Patria Mia, published in 1950. He loved New York but no longer felt at
home there. He felt the city was threatened by commercialism and vulgarity.
He suffered jaundice but nevertheless persuaded his parents to finance his
passage back to Europe. It was nearly 30 years before he visited the United
States again. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the R.M.S.
Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later. After a few days in
London, he visited Paris again, where he worked on a new collection of
poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as a "medley of
pretension", and spent time with Margaret Cravens. When he returned to
London in August 1911, A.R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal The New
Age, hired him to write a weekly column, giving him a steadier income.
Imagism
Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet
Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September she
decided to stay on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including the poet
Richard Aldington, whom she fell in love with and married in 1913. Before
then, the three of them lived in Church Walk—Pound at no. 10, Doolittle at
no. 6, and Aldington at no. 8—and worked daily in the British Museum
Reading Room.
At the museum he also met regularly with the curator and poet Laurence
Binyon, who introduced him to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts
that would become so vital to the imagery and technique of his later poetry.
The museum's visitors' books show that Pound was often to be found during
1912 and 1913 in the Print Room examining Japanese Nishiki-e inscribed
with traditional Japanese waka verse, a 10th century genre of poetry whose
economy and strict conventions undoubtedly contributed to Imagist
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
techniques of composition.
Pound was at that time working on the poems that became Ripostes (1912),
trying to move away from his earlier work, which he wrote later had reduced
Ford Madox Ford in 1911 to rolling on the floor laughing at Pound's stilted
language. He realized with his translation work that the problem lay not in
his knowledge of the other languages, but in his use of English:
What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the
sediment present in my own available vocabulary ... You can't go round this
sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and
another ten to get rid of that education.
Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes.
Rossetti made his own language. I hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't
mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.
He understood that to change the structure of your language is to change
the way you think and see the world. While living at Church Walk in 1912,
Pound, Aldington, and Doolittle started working on ideas about language that
became the Imagism movement. The aim was clarity: a fight against
abstraction, romanticism, rhetoric, inversion of word order, and over-use of
adjectives. Pound later said they agreed in the spring or early summer of
1912 on three principles:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of a metronome.
Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, were to be avoided, as were
expressions like "dim lands of peace," which he said dulled the image by
mixing the abstract with the concrete. He wrote that the natural object was
always the "adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions," and
should not re-tell in mediocre verse what has already been told in good
prose. A classic example of the style is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"
(1913), inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a
train at, I think, La Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and
then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's
face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for
what this made me feel."
Ripostes and Translation Work
It was in Ripostes, submitted to Swift & Co in February 1912 and published
by them that October, that Pound moved toward more minimalist language,
though Knapp writes that it is an uncertain volume, published when Pound
had only begun his move toward Imagism; his first use of the word
"Imagiste" was in Ripostes.
Michael Alexander writes that the poems show a greater concentration of
meaning and economy of rhythm than his earlier work. The collection
includes five poems by the British poet T.E. Hulme, killed in Flanders in 1917
during the First World War to Pound's great distress. It also includes his
translation of the eighth-century Old English poem "The Seafarer", not a
literal translation, but a personal interpretation intended for readers with no
Old English, a poem in its own right.
It upset scholars, as did his other translations from Latin, Italian, French,
and Chinese, either because of errors or because he lacked familiarity with
the cultural context. Alexander writes that in some circles his translations
made him more unpopular than the treason charge, and the reaction to The
Seafarer was a rehearsal for the response to Homage to Sextus Propertius in
1919. His translation from the Italian of Sonnets and ballate of Guido
Cavalcanti was also published in 1912.
Of great importance too was his work on the papers of Ernest Fenollosa
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
(1853–1908), an American professor who had taught in Japan, and who had
started translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays, with which Pound
became fascinated. Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what
he called the ideogrammic method. Fenollosa had studied Chinese poetry
under a Japanese scholar, and in 1913 his widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa,
decided to give his unpublished notes to Pound after seeing his work; she
said she was looking for someone who cared about the poetry, rather than
the philology.
Pound knew no Chinese himself, and was working from the posthumous
notes of an American who had studied Chinese under a Japanese teacher.
Nevertheless, Michael Alexander writes that there are competent judges of
Chinese and English poetry who see Pound's work as the best translations of
Chinese to English poetry ever made, though scholars have complained that
it contains many mistakes, even more than The Seafarer. The result, the
collection Cathay (1915), is in Alexander's view the most attractive volume
of Pound's work. Wai-lim Yip of the Chinese University of Hong Kong writes:
"One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of Chinese
studies, but it seems clear that in his dealings with Cathay, even when he is
given only the barest details, he is able to get into the central concerns of
the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance."
Marriage, BLAST
He was hired in August 1912 by Harriet Monroe as a regular contributor to
Poetry, and started submitting poems by himself, James Joyce, Robert Frost,
D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, H.D., and Aldington, as well as collecting material for
a 64-page anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), which included Joyce's "I Hear
an Army Charging Upon the Land." The Imagist movement began to attract
attention from critics. In November 1913 Yeats took Pound to stay with him
in rooms he rented in Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, to act as
his secretary—Yeats's eyesight was failing—and they stayed there for 10
weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods, and fencing for exercise.
It was the first of three winters they spent there together, including two with
Dorothy after she and Pound were married on 20 April 1914.
The marriage proceeded despite initial opposition from her parents, who
were concerned about Pound's lack of income. He had only his earnings from
literary magazines, particularly Poetry, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist,
and was probably earning considerably less than £300 a year. Dorothy's
income was £50 of her own and £150 from her family. Her parents
eventually consented, perhaps out of fear that she was getting older and no
other suitor was in sight. Pound's concession to marry in church helped.
Afterwards he and Dorothy moved into a large—famously triangular—room
with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, near Church Walk, with the
newly wed Hilda and Richard Aldington living next door.
Pound began writing for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine BLAST; only two
issues ever appeared, the first in June 1914 and the second a year later. An
advertisement in The Egoist said it would discuss "Cubism, Futurism,
Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Pound took the opportunity to
extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is
a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which,
and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." When in reaction to the
magazine, Lascelles Abercrombie called for the rejection of Imagism and a
return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to
a duel on the basis that, "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a
public menace."
Abercrombie suggested as their choice of weapon unsold copies of their own
books. The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New
England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the Imagists, but
Hilda and Richard were already moving away from Pound's understanding of
the movement, as he moved closer to Wyndham Lewis's ideas. When Lowell
agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not
included. He began to call Imagisme "Amygism," and in July 1914 declared it
dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Anglicized it.
First World War, Disillusionment
Between 1914 and 1916 he helped to have James Joyce's A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man serialized in The Egoist then published in book form,
and he persuaded Poetry to publish T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock in June 1915. Conrad Aiken writes that he had shown Prufrock to
every conceivable editor in England, but it was dismissed as crazy. He
eventually sent it to Pound who, Aiken writes, instantly saw that it was a
work of genius and sent it to Poetry."[Eliot] has actually trained himself AND
modernized himself ON HIS OWN," Pound wrote to Monroe in October 1914.
"The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both.
Most of the swine have done neither."
After the publication in 1915 of Cathay, Pound began to speak of working on
his long poem. He told a friend in August: "It is a huge, I was going to say,
gamble, but shan't," and in September told another that it was a
"cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the
next four decades unless it becomes a bore." About a year later, he had the
form of the first three attempts at Canto I, published in Poetry in January
1917. He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From
1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age under the pen name William
Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Little Review and The Egoist. The volume
of writing exhausted him, and he began to believe he was wasting his time
with prose.
In 1919 he collected and published his essays for The Little Review into a
volume called Instigations, and published "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in
Poetry. "Homage" is not a strict translation; Moody describes it as "the
refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". Harriet Monroe,
editor of Poetry, published a letter from a professor of Latin, W.G. Hale,
saying that Pound was "incredibly ignorant" of the language, and alluded to
"about three-score errors" in Homage. Harriet did not publish Pound's
response, which began "Cat-piss and porcupines!!" and continued, "The thing
is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than
Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation ..." But she interpreted his silence after
that as his resignation as foreign editor.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—about a poet whose life, like Pound's, has become
sterile and meaningless—was published in June 1920, marking his farewell to
London. He was disgusted by the lives lost during the war and could not
reconcile himself with it. Stephen Adams writes that, just as T. S. Eliot
denied he was Prufrock, so Pound denied he was Mauberley, but the
poem—made up of 18 short poems—is nevertheless read as
autobiographical. It begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary
scene, then turns to social criticism and economics, and an attack on the
causes of the war, the word "usury" appearing in his work for the first time.
The critic F.R. Leavis saw it as Pound's major achievement.
The war had shattered his belief in modern western civilization. He saw the
Vorticist movement as finished and doubted his own future as a poet. He had
only the New Age to write for, with other magazines ignoring his submissions
or not reviewing his work. Toward the end of 1920 he and Dorothy decided
their time in London was over, and resolved to move to Paris. A. R. Orage
wrote in the January 1921 issue of The New Age:
Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too
emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country
.... Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England ...
however, Mr. Pound ... has made more enemies than friends. Much of the
Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some
time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to
live on much less than would support a navvy.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Paris (1921-24)
The Pounds settled in Paris in January 1921 in an inexpensive apartment at
70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs. He became friendly with Marcel
Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and
Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting, Ernest Hemingway, and his
wife Hadley. He spent most of his time building furniture for his apartment
and bookshelves for the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and in 1921
his Poems 1918–1921 was published. In 1922 Eliot sent him the manuscript
of "The Waste Land", then arrived in Paris to edit it with Pound, who
blue-inked it with comments like "make up yr. mind ..." and "georgian." Eliot
wrote of it: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed
passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should
wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of
Pound's critical genius."
In 1924 Pound secured funding for Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review
from American attorney John Quinn, and in it were published works by
Pound, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts from Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. Pound wrote music
reviews for it that were later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on
Harmony.
Hemingway turned to Pound, who had gained a reputation as "an unofficial
minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary talent", to blue-ink
his short stories. Although 14 years younger than Pound, the two forged a
relationship of mutual respect and friendship, living on the same street for a
time, and touring Italy together in 1923; as Hemingway biographer Jeffrey
Meyers writes, "They liked each other personally, shared the same aesthetic
aims, and admired each other's work", with Hemingway assuming the status
of pupil to Pound's teaching. Pound introduced Hemingway to Lewis, Ford,
and Joyce, while Hemingway in turn tried to teach Pound to box, but as he
told Sherwood Anderson, "[Ezra] habitually leads with his chin and has the
general grace of a crayfish of crawfish".
Pound was 36 when he met the American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the
fall of 1922, beginning a love affair that lasted 50 years. John Tytell writes
that Pound had always felt there was a link between his creativity and his
ability to seduce women, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over
the years. He complained shortly after arriving in Paris that he had been
there for three months without having managed to find a mistress. He was
introduced to Olga, then 26, at a musical salon hosted by American heiress
Natalie Barney in her home at 20 rue Jacob, near the Boulevard
Saint-Germain.
The two moved in different social circles: she was the daughter of a wealthy
Youngstown, Ohio steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on
the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while his friends were mostly
impoverished writers of the Left Bank. They spent the following summer in
the south of France, where he worked with George Antheil to apply the
concept of Vorticism to music, and managed to write two operas, including
Le Testament de Villon. He also wrote pieces for solo violin, which Olga
performed.
Italy (1924-45)
Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy was complaining about the winters,
and Pound's health was poor. Hemingway wrote that Pound "indulged in a
small nervous breakdown necessitating spending two days in the Am.
Hospital (American Hospital). They decided to move to a quieter place, and
chose Rapallo, Italy, a town with a population of 15,000. "Italy is my place
for starting things," he told a friend. Olga Rudge followed them there,
carrying Pound's child. She apparently had no interest in raising a child, but
Tytell writes that she felt having one would keep her connected to him. She
gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 9 July 1925 in Brixen, and the baby was
handed over to a German-speaking peasant woman whose own child had
died, and who agreed to raise Mary (later de Rachewiltz) for 200 lire a
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
month.
Pound told Dorothy about the birth, and in March 1926—after returning from
a three-month visit to Egypt—she announced that she too was pregnant. She
and Pound left Rapallo for Paris for the premiere of Le Testament de Villon,
without mentioning the pregnancy to Pound's friends or parents, and on 10
September 1926 Hemingway drove her to the American Hospital of Paris for
the birth of a son, Omar.
In a letter to his parents in October Pound wrote, "next generation (male)
arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well." Dorothy handed the baby over
to her mother, Olivia, who raised him in London until he was old enough to
go to boarding school. When Dorothy went to England each summer to see
Omar, Pound would spend the time with Olga, whose father had bought her
a house in Venice. The arrangement meant his children were raised very
differently. Mary had one pair of shoes and books about Jesus and the saints,
while Omar was raised as an English gentleman in Kensington by his
sophisticated grandmother.
In 1925 the literary magazine This Quarter dedicated its first issue to Pound,
including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. Pound published Cantos
17–19 in the winter editions. In March 1927 he launched his own literary
magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. It did well in the
first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil
Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. J.J. Wilhelm
argues that some of the worst work came from Pound himself in the form of
rambling editorials about Confucianism and praise of Lenin. He continued to
work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 won the Dial poetry award for
his translation of Confucius's poem Ta Hio. That year Homer and Isabel
visited him in Rapallo. They had not seen him since 1914, and by then
Homer had retired so they decided to move to Rapallo themselves, taking a
small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.
The Cantos
The bulk of Pound's work on The Cantos began after his move to Italy. Like
all the other great epics, it is the story of good and evil, a descent into hell
and progress to paradise. Its hundreds of characters fall into three groups:
those who enjoy hell and stay there; those who experience a metamorphosis
and want to leave; and a few who lead the rest to paradiso terrestre. He
began work on it in 1915, but there were several false starts and he
abandoned most of his earlier drafts, beginning again in 1922. The subject
matter ranges from Odysseus, Troy, Dionysus, Malatesta, Confucius, and
Napoleon, to Jefferson and Mussolini, Chinese history, Pisa, and usury,
relying on memories, diaries, jokes, hymns, anecdotes, ideogrammic
translation, and up to 15 different languages. Allen Tate, who supported
Pound for the Bollingen Prize for the sections of The Cantos known as the
Pisan Cantos, writes that the poem is not about anything, and has no
beginning, middle, or end. He argues that Pound was incapable of sustained
thought and was "at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight,' Icarian
self-indulgences of prejudices."
The first three cantos—now known as the ur-Cantos—appeared in Poetry in
June–August 1917. The Malatesta Cantos (Cantos VIII, IX, X, and XI of a
Long Poem) appeared in The Criterion in July 1923, and two further cantos
were published in the transatlantic review in January 1924. Pound published
90 copies in Paris in 1925 A Draft of XVI. Cantos of Ezra Pound for the
Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book.[63] It was
followed by A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Eleven New Cantos XXI–XLI
(1934), The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937), Cantos LII–LXXI (1940), The
Pisan Cantos (1948), written while in custody in Pisa, and Seventy Cantos
(1950). The first complete edition was published in 1964 as The Cantos
(1–109), followed by Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII (1968).
Turn to Fascism, Second World War
Pound came to believe during the 1920s that the cause of the First World
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
War was finance capitalism, which he called "usury," and that the solution
was C.H. Douglas's idea of social credit, with fascism as the vehicle for
reform; he had met Douglas in The New Age offices and had been impressed
by his ideas.
He presented a series of lectures on economics, and made contact with
politicians in the United States about education, interstate commerce and
international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against it, on 30 January
1933 Pound met Mussolini himself. Olga Rudge had played for Mussolini and
had told him about Pound; Pound had already sent him a copy of Cantos
XXX. During the meeting he tried to present Mussolini with a digest of his
economic ideas, but Tytell writes that Mussolini brushed them aside, though
he called the Cantos "divertente" (entertaining). The meeting was recorded
in Canto 41: "'Ma questo' / said the boss, 'è divertente.'". Pound told Douglas
that he had "never met anyone who seemed to GET my ideas so quickly as
the boss."
A number of Pound's books were published in the 1930s, including ABC of
Economics (1933), ABC of Reading (1934), Social Credit: An Impact (1935),
Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1936), and A Guide to Kulchur (1938). In 1936
James Laughlin—who had visited him in Rapallo in 1933 as a 20-year-old
student—set up New Directions Publishing, and acted as Pound's agent,
finding publications to accept his work and writing reviews.
When Dorothy's mother died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked
Pound to organize the funeral, where he met their 12-year-old son Omar for
the first time in eight years. He visited T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who
produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed
for New York, believing he could stop America from involvement in the
Second World War, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini
while he lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. He traveled to
Washington, D.C. where he met senators and congressmen.
Mary said he did it out of a sense of responsibility, rather than megalomania;
he was offered no encouragement, and left depressed and frustrated. He
received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College on 12 June, and a
week later returned to Italy. He began writing antisemitic material for Italian
newspapers, including one entitled "The Jews, Disease Incarnate." He wrote
to James Laughlin that Roosevelt represented Jewry, and signed the letter
"Heil Hitler." He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British
fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the Third Reich was the "natural
civilizer of Russia." After war broke out in September 1939, he began a
furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six
months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international
banking conspiracy, and that the United States should keep out of it.
Radio Broadcasts
Tytell writes that by the 1940s no American or English poet had been so
active politically since William Blake. Pound had written over a thousand
letters a year during the previous decade, and had presented his ideas in
hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. According to Tytell, Pound's
fear was an economic structure that depended on the armaments industry,
where the profit motive alone would govern war and peace. He started
reading George Santayana, and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks
Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer
becoming dominant. He wrote in The Japan Times that "Democracy is now
currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'" and told Oswald
Mosley's newspaper the English were a slave race governed by the
Rothschilds since Waterloo.
He broadcast over Rome Radio, though the Italian government was at first
reluctant, concerned he might be a double agent. He told a friend: "It took
me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wrangling etc., to GET HOLD of
their microphone." He recorded just over a hundred broadcasts, and traveled
to Rome one week a month to pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for
which he was paid around $17. The broadcasts required the Italian
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
government's approval in advance—though he often changed the text in the
studio. The politics apart, he needed the money. Tytell writes that his voice
had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a
jar." He continued to occasionally broadcast, and writing under pseudonyms
until about April 1945, shortly before his arrest.
Arrest for Treason
A few weeks later he returned south via Milan to Olga and Dorothy. They had
been living in Isabel's apartment, but it was small so they decided to move in
with Olga at Sant' Ambrogio. His daughter Mary, then 19, was sent to Gais in
Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she wrote, "pent up with two women who
loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other." He was in
Rome when the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. Pound borrowed a pair of
hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell
Mary about his wife and son. He traveled 450 miles north, spending a night
in an air raid shelter in Bologna, and taking a train part of the way to Verona.
She almost failed to recognize him when he arrived, he was so dirty and
tired. He told her everything about his other family; she later said she felt
more pity than anger.
He returned to Rapallo, where on 2 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was
shot, armed partisans arrived at the house while Pound was there alone. He
stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket, and was
taken to their HQ in Chiavari, although he was released shortly afterwards.
He and Olga gave themselves up to an American military post in the nearby
town of Lavagna.
It was decided that Pound should be transported to U.S. Counter Intelligence
Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by Frank L.
Amprin, the FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to gather evidence
following the 1943 indictment. Pound asked permission to send a cable to
President Truman to offer to help negotiate peace with Japan. He also asked
to deliver a final broadcast from a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling," in
which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy,
the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward
Germany. His requests were denied and the script forwarded to Hoover.
On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, he told a reporter from the
Philadelphia Record who had managed to get into the compound for an
interview that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint," and that Mussolini was an
"imperfect character who lost his head." On 24 May he was transferred to the
United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, used to house
military personnel awaiting court martial. The temporary commander placed
him in one of the camp's "death cells"—a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor
steel cages lit up all night by floodlights.
He was left for three weeks in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes
inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and no communication with
the guards, except for the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to
break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth writes that he recorded it in
Canto 80, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou
swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft
broke and the waters went over me." Medical staff moved him out of the
cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by
psychiatrists, one of whom found symptoms of a mental breakdown, and he
was transferred to his own officer's tent and allowed reading material. He
began to write, and drafted what became known as The Pisan Cantos; the
existence of a few sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto
LXXXIV suggests he started it while in the cage.
United States (1945-58)
He was transferred to the United States on 15 November, 1945. An escorting
officer's impression was that "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined
that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his
aims and motives." On 25 November he was arraigned in Washington D.C.
on charges of treason. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy,
attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support
of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States.
He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, where in June 1946 Dorothy was
declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison
ward, Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole," a building without windows in
a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes, which allowed the
psychiatrists to observe him while they tried to agree on a diagnosis.Visitors
were allowed only for 15 minutes at a time, while other patients wandered
around outside the room screaming and frothing at the mouth, according to
T. S. Eliot.
Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell – whose efforts to have him declared insane
are credited with having saved him from life imprisonment— requested his
release at a bail hearing in January 1947. The hospital's superintendent,
Winfred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant
surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which
is where he spent the next 12 years.
The historian Stanley Kutler was given access in the 1980s to military
intelligence and other government documents about Pound, including his
hospital records. He wrote that the psychiatrists believed Pound had a
narcissistic personality, but they considered him sane. Kutler said that
Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was
fascinated by him.
Tytell argues that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last
provided for, and was allowed to read, write, and receive visitors, including
Dorothy for several hours a day. He took over a small alcove with wicker
chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where
he entertained his friends and important literary figures. He began work on
his translation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis and Electra, and continued
work on The Cantos. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any
attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, once in 1952
and again in 1955, and was unable to convince him to be more assertive
about his release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has ... bats in the belfry but it
strikes me that he has fewer not more than before his incarceration."
The Pisan Cantos
His publisher, James Laughlin, had Cantos 74–84 ready for publication in
1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave Pound an advance
copy, but he had held it back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish.
Tytell writes that in June 1948 a group of Pound's friends—Eliot, Cummings,
W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell—met Laughlin to discuss how to
have him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men
conceived a plan to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new
national poetry award just announced by the Library of Congress, with
$1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.
The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress,
including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken,
Amy Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was
that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if
Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published The
Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to
Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the
wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted Pound for
treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an antisemite
because he was Jewish himself. Pound's response to the news of the award
was, "No comment from the bughouse."
There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said
"poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of
the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday
Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to
admire in Pound, not one line." Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an
investigation into the awards committee, and as a result it was the last time
the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.
Controversial friendships, release
Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, Tytell writes that in
private it continued. He often refused to talk to psychiatrists with
Jewish-sounding names, would refer to people he disliked as Jews, and urged
his visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery
claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination. He struck up a
friendship during the 1950s with the writer Eustace Mullins, believed to be
associated with the Aryan League of America, who wrote a biography of
Pound, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (1961).
Even more damaging was his friendship with a far-right activist and member
of the Ku Klux Klan, John Kasper. Kasper had come to admire Pound during
some literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the
two became friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953
called "Make it New," reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; it
specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry
and translations were displayed in the window. Kasper and another follower
of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series,
which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform. Kasper
was eventually jailed for the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in
Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student. Wilhelm
writes that there were a lot of perfectly respectable people visiting Pound
too, such as the classicist J.P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it
was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out, and it delayed
his release from St Elizabeths. In an interview for the Paris Review in 1954,
when asked by interviewer George Plimpton about Pound's relationship with
Kaspar, Hemingway replied that Pound should be released and Kaspar jailed.
Eliot's friends continued to try to secure his release. MacLeish wrote to
Hemingway in June 1957 asking him to write a letter on Pound's behalf.
Hemingway believed Pound was unable to abstain from awkward political
statements or from friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed the
letters of support anyway, and pledged $1,500 to be given to Pound when he
was released. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1954, he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release
poets."
In 1957 several publications began campaigning for his release. Le Figaro
published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths." The New
Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed suit; The Nation argued that
Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but that he had rights too. In 1958
MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging
no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the
hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying
Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served
no therapeutic purpose. The motion was heard on 18 April by the same judge
who had committed him to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not
oppose the motion, and Pound was free.
Italy (1958-72)
Pound arrived in Naples in July, where he was photographed giving a fascist
salute by the waiting press. When asked by the press when he had been
released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the
hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum." He and
Dorothy went to live with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano in the
Province of South Tyrol, where he met his grandson, Walter, and his
granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time—then returned to Rapallo, where
Olga Rudge was waiting to join them. They were accompanied by a teacher
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years younger than he was,
who was now ostensibly acting as his secretary, collecting poems for an
anthology. The four women soon fell out, vying for control over him; Canto
113 alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness / 3 pains of hell."
Pound was in love with Marcella, seeing in her his last chance for love and
youth. He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast /
and to know beauty and death and despair / And to think that what has been
shall be, / flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but
she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Marcella was seen
off, sent back to America. Pound wrote to Hemingway: "Old man him tired."
By December 1959 he had fallen into a depression, insisting his work was
worthless and The Cantos were botched. In a 1960 interview given in Rome
to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." Hall
wrote that he seemed in an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness,
abulia, waste." He paced up and down during the three days it took to
complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one
minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse.
Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in
his life." Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in
the summer of 1960 Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight
dropped. He picked up again, but by the spring of 1961 he had a urinary
infection.
Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went that summer to live with
Olga in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that
with Omar. He attended a neo-Fascist May Day parade in 1962, but his
health continued to decline. The next year he told an interviewer, Grazia
Levi, "I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered. ... All my life I
believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of
meaning."
William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T. S. Eliot.
Pound attended Eliot's funeral in London and traveled to Dublin to visit
Yeats's widow. Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in October 1967. He
described his work to Ginsberg as: "A mess ... my writing, stupidity and
ignorance all the way through," and in the Pensione Alle Salute da Cici
restaurant in Venice, he told Ginsberg, Peter Russell, and Michael Reck: "...
but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all
along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy years that I was not a
lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better ..."
He traveled to New York two years later for the opening of an exhibition that
featured his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land, and received a
standing ovation at Hamilton College when he accompanied Laughlin who
was receiving an honorary doctorate. Shortly before his death in 1972 it was
proposed he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's
council opposed it by 13 to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the
committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who
explore hate and those who approve it.
Two weeks before his 87th birthday he read for a gathering of friends at a
café: "re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The
cause is AVARICE."
On his birthday he was too weak to leave his bedroom at his home on the
Piazza San Marco, and the following night he was admitted to the Civil
Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1
November, aged 87, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to
the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island
cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and
Stravinsky. Dorothy died in England the following year. Olga died in 1996
and was buried next to Pound.
Reception
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Opinion varies about the nature of Pound's writing style. Critics generally
agree that he was a strong lyricist, particularly in his early work. Scholars
such as Ira Nadel see evidence of modernism in his poetry before he began
the Cantos, and Witmeyer argues that, as early as Ripostes, a modern style
is evident. His style drew on literature from a variety of disciplines. Nadel
writes that he wanted his poetry to represent an "objective presentation of
material which he believed could stand on its own," without use of symbolism
or romanticism. The Chinese writing system most closely met his ideals. He
used Chinese ideograms to represent "the thing in pictures," and from Noh
theater learned that plot could be replaced by a single image.
Nadel argues that imagism was to change Pound's poetry. He explains,
"Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ... replacing Victorian
generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics."
Imagism, to Pound, was a form of minimalism, as represented by the
two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro". However, minimalism didn't lend
itself to the writing of an epic such as the Cantos, and so Pound turned to the
more dynamic structure of what he considered Vorticism for the Cantos.
Translations
In his Fenollosa translations, unlike previous American translators of Chinese
poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound
created free verse translations. Whether the poems are valuable as
translations continues to be a source of controversy. Pound scholar Ming Xie
explains that the use of language in Pound's translation of the Old English
poem "The Seafarer" is deliberate, avoiding merely "trying to assimilate the
original into contemporary language". After his work with The Seafarer, it
was in the Japanese Noh plays that he found an answer to his search for
anti-naturalist minimalism which occurred just prior to his initial work with
Fenellosa's papers, leading to the translation of 14 Chinese poems in Cathay,
published in 1915.
Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound
has been criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have
no basis in the original texts, though critics argue that the fidelity of Cathay
to the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter "The
Invention of China" from The Pound Era, contends that Cathay should be
read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately
translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner
argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an
effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible
translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually
experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.
Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a
great gift of language and an incisive intelligence. He helped popularize
major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu and brought Provençal and
Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. He revived interest in the
Confucian classics and introduced the west to classical Japanese poetry and
drama. He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon
classics, and helped keep them alive at a time when classical education was
in decline, and poets no longer considered translations central to their craft.
Legacy
His own work apart, he was responsible for advancing the careers of some of
the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century. In addition to
Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, and Hemingway, he befriended and
helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E.
Cummings, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Hugh
Witemeyer argues that the Imagist movement was the most important in
20th-century English language poetry because hardly any prominent poet of
Pound's generation and the two generations after him was untouched by it.
As early as 1917 Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry,
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may
be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and
vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a
preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned."
Beyond this, his legacy is mixed. Hugh Kenner wrote in 1951 that there was
no great contemporary writer less read than Pound, though he added that
there was also no one who could appeal through "sheer beauty of language"
to people who would rather read poets than talk about them. The British poet
Philip Larkin criticized him, "for being literary, which to me is the foundation
of his feebleness, thinking that poetry is made out of poetry and not out of
being alive."
His antisemitism became central to an evaluation of his poetry, including
whether it was read at all. Wendy Stallard Flory argues that the best
approach to The Cantos—separating the poetry from the antisemitism—is
perceived as apologetic. Her view is that the establishment of Pound as
"National Monster" and "designated fascist intellectual" made him a stand-in
for the silent majority in Germany, occupied France and Belgium, as well as
Britain and the United States who, she argues, made the Holocaust possible
by aiding or standing quietly by. The outrage after the treason charge was so
deep that the imagined method of his execution dominated the discussion.
Arthur Miller considered him worse than Hitler: "In his wildest moments of
human vilification Hitler never approached our Ezra ...he knew all America's
weaknesses and he played them as expertly as Goebbels ever did". The
response went so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was
only in the 1980s that critics began a re-evaluation. The critic Macha
Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant
rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made
manifest" in Ezra Pound.
Eserleri:
Books published in his lifetime
1908 A Lume Spento. Privately printed by A. Antonini, Venice, (poems).
1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule. Pollock, London; and Elkin Mathews,
London, (poems).
1909 Personae. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
1909 Exultations. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
1910 The Spirit of Romance. Dent, London, (prose).
1910 Provenca. Small, Maynard, Boston, (poems).
1911 Canzoni. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems)
1912 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti Small, Maynard,
Boston, (cheaper edition destroyed by fire, Swift & Co, London; translations)
1912 Ripostes. S. Swift, London, (poems; first announcement of Imagism)
1915 Cathay. Elkin Mathews, (poems; translations)
1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir. John Lane, London, (prose).
1916 Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest
Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by
William Butler Yeats.
1916 Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound: "Noh", or, Accomplishment: A Study
of the Classical Stage of Japan. Macmillan, London,
1916 Lustra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, (translations)
1917 Lustra Knopf, New York. (poems). With a version of the first Three
Cantos (Poetry, vol. 10, nos. 3, June 1917, 4, July 1917, 5, August 1917).
1918: Pavannes and Divisions. Knopf, New York. prose
1918 Quia Pauper Amavi. Egoist Press, London. poems
1919 The Fourth Canto. Ovid Press, London
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press, London.
1920 Umbra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems and translations)
1920 Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa. Boni &
Liveright, (prose).
1921 Poems, 1918–1921. Boni & Liveright, New York
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
1922 Remy de Gourmount: The Natural Philosophy of Love. Boni &
Liveright, New York, (translation)
1923 Indiscretions, or, Und Revue des deux mondes. Three Mountains
Press, Paris.
1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris, (essays). As: William
Atheling.
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos. Three Mountains Press, Paris. The first
collection of The Cantos.
1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Boni & Liveright, New
York
1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. John Rodker, London.
1928 Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. Faber
& Gwyer, London
1928 Confucius: Ta Hio: The Great Learning, newly rendered into the
American language. University of Washington Bookstore (Glenn Hughes),
(translation)
1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos. Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Paris.
1930 Imaginary Letters. Black Sun Press, Paris. Eight essays from the
Little Review, 1917–18.
1931 How to Read. Harmsworth, (essays)
1933 ABC of Economics. Faber, London, (essays)
1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI. Farrer & Rinehart, New York,
(poems)
1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius. Faber, London (poems)
1934 ABC of Reading. Yale University Press, (essays)
1935 Alfred Venison's Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of
Titchfield Street. Stanley Nott, Pamphlets on the New Economics, No. 9,
London, (essays)
1935 Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Stanley Nott, London, Liveright, 1936
(essays)
1935 Make It New. London, (essays)
1935 Social Credit. An Impact. London, (essays). Repr.: Peter Russell,
Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 5, London 1951.
1936 Ernest Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry. Stanley Nott, London 1936. An Ars Poetica With Foreword and Notes
by Ezra Pound.
1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos. Farrer & Rinehart, New York, poems
1937 Polite Essays. Faber, London, (essays)
1937 Confucius: Digest of the Analects, edited and published by Giovanni
Scheiwiller, (translations)
1938 Culture. New Directions. New edition: Guide to Kulchur, New
Directions, 1952
1939 What Is Money For?. Greater Britain Publications, (essays). Money
Pamphlets by Pound, no. 3, Peter Russell, London
1940 Cantos LXII-LXXI. New Directions, New York, (John Adams Cantos
62–71).
1942 Carta da Visita di Ezra Pound. Edizioni di lettere d'oggi. Rome.
English translation, by John Drummond: A Visiting Card, Money Pamphlets
by Pound, no. 4, Peter Russell, London 1952, (essays).
1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. Casa editrice
della edizioni popolari, Venice. English translation, by John Drummond:
America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Money Pamphlets by
Pound, no. 6, Peter Russell, London 1951
1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.. Casa editrice della
edizioni popolari. Venice. English translation An Introduction to the Economic
Nature of the United States, by Carmine Amore. Repr.: Peter Russell, Money
Pamphlets by Pound, London 1950 (essay)
1944 Orientamini. Casa editrice dalla edizioni popolari. Venice (prose)
1944 Oro et lavoro: alla memoria di Aurelio Baisi. Moderna, Rapallo.
English translation: Gold and Work, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 2, Peter
Russell, London 1952 (essays)
1948 If This Be Treason. Siena: privately printed for Olga Rudge by Tip
Nuova (original drafts of six of Pound's Rome radio broadcasts)
1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, (Cantos 74–84)
1948 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (includes The Pisan Contos). New
Directions, poems
1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Pound and Rudd Fleming
1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, New York.
1950 Seventy Cantos. Faber, London.
1950 Patria Mia. R. F. Seymour, Chicago [Reworked New Age articles,
1912, '13 (Orage)
1951 Confucius: The Great Digest; The Unwobbling Pivot. New Directions
(translation)
1951 Confucius: Analects (John) Kaspar & (David) Horton, Square $
Series, New York, (translation)
1953 Hugh Kenner (ed.): The Translations of Ezra Pound, New Directions,
(translations)
1954 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Harvard University
Press (translations)
1954 Lavoro ed Usura. All'insegna del pesce d'oro. Milan (essays)
1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares. All'insegna del pesce
d'oro, Milan, (poems)
1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound. Neville
Spearman, London, (translation)
1957 Brancusi. Milan (essay)
1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares. New Directions, (poems)
1960 Noel Stock (ed.): Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of
American Civilization. Henri Regnery, Chicago
1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII. New Directions, (poems)
Selected posthumous publications
1975 William Levy (ed.): Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound. Cold
Turkey Press, Rotterdam
1976 Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound. New Directions.
1977 R. Murray Schafer (ed.): Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete
Criticism. New Directions, (essays).
1978 Leonard W. Doob (ed.): 'Ezra Pound Speaking': Radio Speeches of
World War II. Greenwood Press (speeches)
1980 Harriet Zinnes (ed.): Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. New Directions
(essays)
1991 Charlotte Ward (ed.): Pound's Translations of Arnaut Daniel.
Garland, New York 1991 (translations)
1992 Richard Sieburth (ed.): A Walking Tour of Southern France: Ezra
Pound Among the Troubadours. New Directions, New York.
1996 Maria Luisa Ardizzone (ed.): Machine Art and Other Writings: The
Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Duke University Press. (essays)
1997 Jack Ross: Ezra Pound' s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with
Rimbaud's 'Poets at Seven Years Old' . Perdrix Press, Auckland (the two Salo
Cantos were first published in the newspaper: Marina Repubblicanain early
1945; re-published in 1973 in an edition of 25; in Cantos editions
(untranslated in Italian) since 1986.
2002 Massimo Bacigalupo (ed.): Canti postumi. Mondadori, Milan,
(Cantos)
2002 Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments
1931–1933 (MIT Press) with the complete radio script by Pound for the 1931
broadcast of Le Testament.
2003 First edition of Cavalcanti, three-act opera (1931–1932). Robert
Hughes and Margaret Fisher: Calvacanti: A Perspective on The Music of Ezra
Pound (engraved music score of complete opera, Second Evening Art
Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-0-4). A compact disk Ego Scriptor
Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound was published in 2003 by Other Minds;
OM 1005-2, (music; 2 operas).
2005 First edition of the unfinished third opera, Collis O Heliconii (c.
1933): The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera Collis O Heliconii, Settings
of Poems by Catullus and Sappho, Margaret Fisher (ed.),(engraved music
scores of two unfinished arias and musical interludes, Second Evening Art
Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-3-5).
User-friendly editions
2003 Richard Sieburth (ed.): Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations. Library
of America. ISBN 978-1-931082-41-9.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
2004 First edition, Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, Robert Hughes,
ed. (engraved music scores, Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN
978-0-9728859-2-8).
2008 First editions of the 1926 and 1933 versions of Ezra Pound's opera
Le Testament. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes (eds.), (engraved music
scores, Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-4-2).
projected, 2011: First edition of the 1923 Le Testament de Villon.
Facsimile of the 1923 holograph music score edited by George Antheil, with
audio CD of the complete opera. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher (eds.),
(Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-8-0).
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
Ezra Pound Reading Canto LXXXI
Poetry: "And the days are not full enough" by Ezra Pound (read by Tom Hiddleston) (12/05)
Ezra Pound Radio #14 (March 6, 1942) "Why Pick on the Jew"
Ezra Pound - A Revolutionary Simpleton - Christopher Hitchens
Ezra Pound: The Curse of Genius
Ezra Pound | E@6 Videopedia | TES | Kalyani Vallath | NTA NET, K SET, G SET, WB SET, GATE, J SET
QUANDO PASOLINI INCONTRÒ EZRA POUND - Due giganti, una via
Ezra Pound Lecture Series - From Idleness to Splendor: Poetic Legacy with Dr. John Gery
Ezra Pound - The Cantos - Canto I
Jonathan Bowden, 'Ezra Pound'
Ezra Pound e Cioran - #Filosofia 39
Massimo Cacciari : Ezra Pound
ALAIN SORAL présente Le Travail et l'Usure d'EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound: Canto LXXXI (1967)
Donald Hall - Interviewing Ezra Pound (44/111)
Donald Hall - Ezra Pound : lonely and misunderstood (45/111)
(Vidéo) Ezra Pound se promenant dans Paris
Ezra Pound reading his Usura Canto, 1939.
Pasolini incontra Ezra Pound (INTEGRALE)
"Ezra Pound: The Controversial Poet Who Redefined Modern Literature." | Biography
Ezra Pound: Artistic Revolutionary - Jonathan Bowden Lecture
Ezra Pound: "Contro l'usura" ("Cantos", XLV)
Ezra Pound Radio #11 "Power" (original broadcast recording)
Quando Ezra Pound si innamorò di Cesena (per chi non l'avesse visto in TV)
Charles Bukowski on Ezra Pound John Fante and other assorted things
Ezra Pound's "The Cantos" read by Mary de Rachewiltz
Conferenza di Marcello Veneziani su Ezra Pound e i Cantos
Incredibile servizio del TG2 su Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound's Biography and Major Works#modern#imagist#history
Imagism Literary Movement in hindi Ezra pound amy lowell & hilda doolittle
Ezra Pound - Canto LXXXI - fragmento - tradução conjunta dos irmãos Campos e de Décio Pignatari
Ezra Pound and The Cantos as precursors to today's bad writing
Ezra Pound. Canto XLV.
'In a Station of the Metro' Ezra Pound Poem Analysis
Documentario Rai / Storia di Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound reading his poem "Sestina: Altaforte"
Ezra Pound - "With Usura" Canto XLV
ROBERTO MERCADINI DIALOGA SU EZRA POUND
A Girl by Ezra Pound - Poetry Reading
The Garden: A Short Poem about Growth and Beauty by Ezra Pound (Underrated Poems)
Ezra POUND – Une Vie, une Œuvre : Violemment américain (France Culture, 1992)
The Grave of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, la RSI e gli intrighi vaticani. Intervista ad Antonio Pantano.
Il sogno di Ezra Pound narrato da Domenico De Simone
Ezra Pound - In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound interview for BBC 1959
Ezra Pound documentary
9. Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound and the Origins of New World Order Theory
Cormac McCarthy on Ezra Pound