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File:Ezra Pound.jpg
1913 photograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and a major figure of the early Modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry to stress clarity, precision and economy of language. From 1912 until the mid-1920s he lived in London and Paris, vigorously promoting the work of the best known modernist writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, visual artists including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and musicians including George Antheil. His later work, covering nearly fifty years, centers on his epic poem The Cantos.

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and grew up in suburban Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He studied classical literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. In 1908 he moved to London where he lived until 1921 before relocating to Paris. During those years his work included the poems Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, as well as articles in The New Age magazines and translations of medieval writers such as Guido Cavalcanti and Ernest Fenollosa. He moved to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924 where he lived for much of the rest of his life. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914; she gave birth to a son, Omar, in 1926. For most of his married life he was romantically involved with the classical violinist Olga Rudge with whom he had a daughter, Mary, in 1925.

After World War I Pound became interested in the theory of social credit, which he promoted aggressively during the 1930s. At the same time he attempted to prevent the United States from entering World War II, and promoted Benito Mussolini's version of fascism. Between 1940 and 1942 he made a series of antisemitic radio addresses from Rome in which he criticized America and supported the policies of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Following his arrest for treason in 1945, he spent almost six months in a detention center in Pisa. For 25 days he was kept in a steel cage, where he suffered a nervous breakdown. During this period he began work on his Pisan Cantos, for which he controversially won the Bollingen Prize. On his return to the United States he was incarcerated at the St. Elizabeths Hospital until 1958. Following his release Pound lived in Italy until his death. He continued to work on The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.

In the early 1970s, literary critic Hugh Kenner published a book titled The Pound Era, ranking Pound as the most influential poet of the early 20th century. Despite Kenner's attempt to resurrect Pound's reputation based on the theory of new criticism, Pound is the most controversial American poet of the 20th century due to his antisemitism, support of Hitler and Mussolini and the charges of treason. Pound died in Italy on 1 November 1972.

Biography

Early life and education

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound, descended from a family about which he stated he "could write the whole social history of the United States". His paternal grandfather Thaddeus C. Pound was a prominent member of the Republican Party, and his mother Isabel descended from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Her family participated in national politics, felt connected to the centers of power and was on speaking terms with politicians and leaders. Thaddeus Pound owned mine-holdings in Wood River Valley, adjacent to Hailey, and his father ran the local United States Land Office. Although Homer built for his wife the first plastered house in Hailey, she claimed the altitude made her sick (Hailey is 5,000 feet (1,500 m) above sea-level) forcing them to leave the area in 1887, traveling through the Great Blizzard of 1887 "behind the first rotary snow-plough". They lived for a year with Isabel's uncle in New York, and the next year with Thaddeus Pound in Wisconsin. In 1889 Homer accepted a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint.

The family lived in suburban Wyncote, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, although Pound often visited relatives in New York. HIs first trip to Europe was in 1898 with his Aunt Frank, visiting England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Until he was 12 he attended public schools in Wyncote and was then sent to the Cheltenham Military Academy where the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and were taught Latin as well as military drills and rifle shooting. Of Cheltenham he wrote, "I could stand everything but the drilling." At 15 he wanted to be a poet and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 where he stayed for two years. In his first year in college he met and established a life-long friendship with William Carlos Williams and H.D., and seemed "wonderfully in love" with H.D. After two years he transferred to Hamilton College, possibly because of poor grades, where he was influenced by his professor of Romance Languages and literature, taking private lessons in Provençal. He studied Anglo-Saxon and medieval poetry, the foundation upon which he was to build his work. He graduated with a Ph.B. in 1905.

He traveled alone to southern France, Paris and London in 1905, and again in 1906 on a post-graduate fellowship to study Lope de Vega's plays for a proposed Ph.D dissertation. He completed an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906, and began a Ph.D with a focus on the Chanson de Roland, Boccaccio's Decameron and the Provençal poets. In 1907 he left the University of Pennsylvania without completing his degree or his dissertation. He took a teaching position at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a conservative town where he attracted scandal by rescuing a stranded and hungry vaudeville actress during a snowstorm. The college dismissed him for immorality. During a brief return to Wyncote he asked H.D. to marry him—she accepted but her father refused on her behalf. He returned to Europe, living for a period in Venice where he self-published his first collection of short poems, A Lume Spento, before moving to London with the intention of meeting William Butler Yeats.

London

Then came Ezra ... his Philadelphia accent was comprehensible if disconcerting; his beard and flowing locks were auburn and luxuriant; he was astonishingly meager and agile. He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs; devoured enormous quantities of your pastry; fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose ... and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel.
—Ford Madox Ford's description of Ezra Pound in 1909.

Pound arrived in London in August 1908 and soon found lodgings, a distributor for A Lume Spento and a position lecturing at the London Polytechnic Institute. He presented himself as an aesthete serious about his art, while affecting a distinct flamboyance—he dressed in brightly colored capes, wore an earring and hand-painted silk shirts. He established himself within the literati of London, and his talent was realized as his poetry, reviews and essays were published. At a literary salon in February, he befriended Olivia Shakespear and her daughter Dorothy. A month later Olivia introduced him to Yeats. By June 1909 he had met critic and poet T. E. Hulme, written and had published Personae to good reviews and was gaining a reputation in the literary world. He was hired to present a second series of lectures, with the lecture notes forming the basis for The Spirit of Romance (1910). Although he was earning little money he decided to stay in London. He enjoyed his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, continued to have poetry and reviews published, and the American critics were taking notice of him.

In 1910 he returned to the United States for a year. His arrival in New York coincided with the publication of The Spirit of Romance, of which a Boston critic wrote, "Pound is a man of clear insight ... But to find himself, he must first get lost." He convinced H.D. to join him in New York but, unable to find work, she returned to Philadelphia promising to visit in Europe if he were to return there. Walter Morse Rummel, whom he had met the previous spring in Paris, arrived for a visit inviting him to Paris for a collaboration on setting troubadour poetry to music. On 22 February 1911 Pound sailed from New York, and did not return to the United States for 28 years.

In Paris he finished the Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel translations begun in New York, worked on Canzoni and the collaboration with Rummel. Through the project with Rummel he developed an interest in music as he began to concentrate on the role of rhythm and pitch in poetry. He spent considerable time with American heiress Margaret Cravens (whom he had met in Paris a year earlier); it was during this period that she gave him a large sum of money to fund his writing career. After returning to London in August, Pound began work on Ripostes, hoping for publication in February. At this time he was influenced by Hulme, who claimed a great artist was one who "dives down into the inner flux of life and comes back with a new shape which he endeavors to fix". Hulme introduced Pound to A.R. Orage, the editor of the socialist journal The New Age, who hired him to write a weekly column.

H.D. arrived in London and decided to stay. Pound introduced her to his friends; she found herself attracted to Richard Aldington, who shared her interest in Hellenism. Pound, Aldington and H.D. worked daily in the British Library Reading Room, and it was in the tearoom one afternoon that they decided to begin a 'movement' in poetry, called Imagism. As early as January 1912 Pound referred to H.D. and Richard Aldington as des imagistes and to their poetry as Imagisme. Imagisme, as they defined it, must adhere to three tenets:

I. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of metronome.

Dorothy Shakespear designed the Vorticism inspired cover art for Pound's Ripostes, published by Elkin Mathews in 1915.

A later definition of the movement appeared in the October 1912 publication of Ripostes. Imagisme, Pound wrote, is "concerned solely with language and presentation". Pound had been hired in August 1912 by Harriet Monroe as a regular contributor to Poetry and within months submitted poems by himself, H.D, Aldington, Yeats, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. The Imagist movement began to attract attention from critics; in 1913 Pound collected work for an anthology of Imagisme poets titled Des Imagistes, published in February 1914. According to biographer A. David Moody, the Imagisme movement, of which Pound said "began certainly at Church Walk with H.D., Richard and myself", peaked in 1913 at a period when "all three had rooms at Church Walk".

When in 1913 Yeats won the annual Poetry prize of the year, for a poem submitted by Pound, he gave the money to Pound in an apparent endorsement of his work, of whom he wrote: "He is certainly a creative personality of some sort, though it is too soon yet to say of what sort." Pound used the money to buy a typewriter and to commission a sculpture from his new friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Gaudier-Brzeska told Pound: "It will not look like you ...It will be the expression of certain emotions which I get from your character." That winter Pound spent the first of three winters with Yeats at Stone Cottage acting as his secretary. From Yeats Pound learned that in folklore a multicultural perspective could be found and, according to Pound scholar George Bornstein, the two pushed one-another towards modernism. Of greater importance was Pound's work on Ernest Fenollosa's papers and translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays given to him by his widow to organize. Eventually Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.

Pound contributed to the Rebel Art Center and Wyndham Lewis' literary magazine BLAST, the first issue of which appeared in June 1914. With its bright cover art and bold lettering, the magazine received a mixed reception—some critics hated it, while others praised the avant-garde style. Because the magazine was devoted to literature and art, Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagism (as applied to poetry) and apply it to art, naming it Vorticism, which he defined in an essay published a few months later. Vorticism, he wrote, was a: "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 Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace."

The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell who came to London to meet the imagists. At the dinner she was embarrassed by Gaudier-Brzeska when he mentioned her weight; when she later hosted her own dinner she was further embarrassed by Pound. Lowell nonetheless decided to publish an anthology of imagist poets, and requested work from H.D., Yeats, Lawrence and others, but refused to include Pound. When critics began to describe Lowell as the "foremost member of Imagists" following the publication of her anthology, Pound was deeply resentful. He began to refer to Imagism as "Amygism", and was further disgusted when his submission to Poetry for T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was rejected on the basis of being too cosmopolitan. In July 1914 Pound declared Imagisme dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually Anglicized it.

On 20 April 1914 Pound married Dorothy Shakespear despite opposition from her father who was concerned about Pound's idiosyncracies and lack of financial stability. Her father relented when the couple agreed to a church rather than a civil ceremony. Pound and his new wife moved into an apartment at 5 Holland Place, with H.D. and the recently married Aldington as neighbors. Although the couple planned to honeymoon in Spain that September, the outbreak of World War I forced them to postpone. They instead lived with Yeats at Stone Cottage for the winter where Pound worked on proofs for the second issue of BLAST. Of Dorothy, Yeats wrote, "she looks as if her face were made out of Dresden china. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is hard to believe she is real; yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures."

World War I and aftermath

In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a small volume of translated Chinese poems, collected by Fenollosa. The work contains "The River Merchant's Wife" and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road and received good reviews. However he increasingly saw himself as an outsider, and added a defense of his work on the last page: "I give only these unquestionable poems ... ...it is quite certain that the personal hatred by which I am held by many, and the invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists will be brought to bear on the flaws of such translations".

He returned to realism during the war years and was determined to promote Lewis, Eliot and Joyce (whom he considered the best writers). After Lewis was sent to the front Pound concentrated on supporting and promoting Joyce and Eliot. He helped finding publishers for both Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Eliot's "Prufrock". New York attorney and art collector John Quinn became a patron and even paid for Joyce's glaucoma operation in 1917.

Pound was deeply affected by the war and devastated when Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches. He was upset when criticized for bad taste for his July 1915 article in BLAST on Rupert Brooke, who had recently been killed in France. In April 1916, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir with letters, illustrations and photographs of Gaudier-Brzeska's work. In the volume Pound "brought the age old art of carving into relation with Vorticism", and established Gaudier's reputation.

E.O. Hoppé photographed Pound in London in 1920.

Publication of Lustra was stopped in 1917 when the editor Elkin Mathews objected to the tone, writing in a letter that it was "unsuitable for the innocent Young Person and the right-thinking Family". Pound refused any suggested revisions, instead the volume was published as a "private edition" that June. During this period, Pound worked on what he began to refer to as his "long poem". According to Pound scholar Daniel Albright, the term 'canto' was to evoke Dante and suggest "that the poem is a Divine Comedy for the modernist age". Despite that, he found inspiration in Robert Browning for the earliest section titled "Three Cantos" published in Poetry in 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 of William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Little Review and Egoist, often writing two to three articles each week. The topics were varied: he wanted better education in the United States, he began to write about economics, discovered and reviewed a French folk singer, and continued to translate Daniel Arnaut. The volume of writing made him disillusioned and exhausted as he began to believe he was wasting his time with prose. He blamed American provincialism when the Comstock Laws were applied to The Little Review suppressing the October issue for perceived vulgarity, and again applied to stop the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses. In September 1917 Hulme was killed by shell fire in Flanders. The Arnaut manuscript was lost at sea and Pound became sick in 1918, presumably with the Spanish influenza. When the Armistice was signed in November, his response was "Thank God the war is mostly over".

World War I shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization to the extent that he came to believe that art had not survived the war. Hulme and Gaudier were killed and Lewis severely wounded. Pound suspected the Vorticist movement itself was finished and he doubted his own future as a poet. In 1919 he collected and published his essays for the Little Review into a volume titled Instigations and published in "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in Poetry. "Homage" is considered an example of modernism rather than a strict translation; as Moody describes it, the work is "the refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". When Harriet Monroe was told by a Latin professor that Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", she decided to publish only the "more decorous parts". Outraged, Pound ended his association with her.

A summer trip to France with Dorothy confirmed Pound's disillusionment. He returned England to a meager income, after been told to return home by the American consulate in Paris. During the fall of 1919 and the early winter of 1920 he earned money through a series for the New Age attacking what he believed to be the three enemies of artistic enlightenment: nationalism, capitalism and organized religion. Pound first met Major C.H. Douglas in the New Age offices, from whom he learned about social credit. He continued to write cantos and quickly finished three more. By the winter of 1920 he had enough material to collect into a single volume, titled Poems 1918–1921.

During the war Pound kept Joyce solvent whle he finished Ulysses, despite that they had never met. In June 1920 he convinced the Irishman, who was living in poverty and considering returning to Ireland, to join him in Italy. Pound gave him a suit, traveled with him to Paris, where he provided introductions and rented lodgings for the family. Back in England, Pound had only the New Age to write for with other magazines ignoring his submissions, or not reviewing his work. In September he was advised against a return to New York with the warning that in the United States "there was too much to irritate and annoy the fine artist that he was".

Six months later Pound and Dorothy moved to Paris. Orage wrote in the New Age of Pound's departure: "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."

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley marked a farewell to Pound's London career. Published in 1920, it conveyes both his rejection of British society and reaction to World War I. Disgusted by the lives lost during the war, Pound was unable to reconcile his beliefs against a society which placed "economic gain at the expense of art". The poems in the first half of the book present a sharp social criticism; those in the second half of the volume focus on a single 'representative' poet—Hugh Selwyn Mauberly—whose life becomes sterile and meaningless. The consequences of the war were catastrophic as far as Pound was concerned; in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley he manifested a break with his life in London and with his previous writing style.

Paris

Pound and Dorothy settled in Paris in 1921. He admitted in a letter that he was feeling uncertain about the future and in Paris intended to "plunge into gawd knows wot". The couple took rooms in a hotel before renting a studio at 70 bis rue de Notre Dame des Champs, near the Dôme Café. He became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was without writing assignment and almost destitute, however Dorothy's income was sufficient to keep them solvent. He built furniture for their apartment and bookshelves for the Shakespeare and Company. In 1921 Boni and Liveright published his Poems 1918–1921 and in 1923 earn money by translating Eduoard Estaunié's L'Appel de la route as The Call of the Road.

File:EzraPound Paris.png
Ezra Pound in Paris in the 1920s

Through a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson were invited for tea with the couple. Hadley found Dorothy's manners intimidating and Hemingway quipped that their apartment was as "poor as Gertrude Stein's studio was rich". Hemingway described Pound as "tall, with a scratchy red beard, fine eyes and strange haircuts". Pound wanted boxing lessons, but according to Hemingway, "habitually leads with his chin and has the general grace of a crayfish of crawfish". They toured Italy together in 1923, returning to bis rue de Notre Dame des Champs in 1924. During their Italian trip, Hemingway took Pound to battlefields and explained the tactics of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in whom Pound found a hero to add to his Cantos.

A number of young writers were emerging in Paris at the time. Pound biographer Hugh Kenner observes that Paris "was if anything, a Printing Vortex. Books were cheap to produce". The custom printing house Three Mountains Press printed and published works by Hemingway, Williams and Pound, while Joyce's Ulysses was eventually printed by an avant-garde French printer. By 1925, a folio edition of Pound's A Draft of XVI Cantos released. Eliot visited Paris in 1921 with the 40 page manuscript of The Waste Land; Pound added extensively blue-inked notes to the draft with comments such as "too easy", "make up yr. mind" and cut three long passages, later describing himself as a "sage homme" (male midwife) of the poem. When Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, Pound rejoiced and wrote reviews for both "The Waste Land" and Ulysses.

Pound was 36 when he met Olga Rudge. The two would have a love affair lasting for the next 50 years. Although he had reviewed Rudge's work—under his pen-name Atheling—they did not meet until some weeks later at Natalie Barney's weekly musical salon. Rudge was that night glamorously dressed in a vintage red Chinese jacket embroidered with gold dragons, with her dark hair bobbed in the style of the 1920s and violet eyes. She was attracted to his looks, charisma and eyes, of which Barney wrote, "Cadmium? amber? no, topaz in Chateau Yquem". The two moved in different social circles: she was a daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats; his friends were mostly equally impoverished writers of the Left Bank. But Olga entranced Pound with her intelligence, looks and musical ability. The following year they summered in southern France where Pound introduced her to "the land of the troubadours". Under her influence he became interested in music, composing two operas, working with George Antheil to apply the concepts of Vorticism to music. Helped by Agnes Bedford, a pianist from London, Pound picked out the rhythm of troubadour poetry; Bedford was surprised at his musical sensibility and the way in which his seemingly unrelated pieces fitted together. During this period he wrote music reviews for the transatlantic review, later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.

He continued to work on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" in this period. They introduce one of the major personas of the poem and reflect Pound's preoccupations with politics and economics. The four cantos of the "Malatesta Sequence" were published in The Criterion, with two further cantos published in the first issue of Ford's transatlantic review in 1924. Pound secured the funding from Quinn for the transatlantic review in which were published works from Pound, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the funds ran out in 1925.

Italy

In 1924 Pound left Paris with Dorothy for Italy to recuperate after suffering from appendicitis. They stayed in Rapallo briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he had two homes, one with Dorothy and one with Olga. Pound accompanied Olga to the Italian Tyrol where she gave birth prematurely to their daughter Mary on 9 July 1925. Dorothy was separated from Pound for much of that year and the next; in March 1926 she returned pregnant from a three-month visit to Egypt. On 10 September 1926 Hemingway drove her to the American Hospital of Paris where her son Omar was born. Neither child was raised with their parents, Mary was taken into foster care in the Tyrolean village of Gais, while Omar was sent to Olivia to be raised in England. Yeats moved to Rapallo in 1928; the following year Homer and Isabel sold their belongings and moved to Italy to join their son.

So far, we have Pound the major poet devoting, say, one-fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes ... of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, and gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them .... He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.
— Ernest Hemingway tribute to Ezra Pound 1925.

In 1925 the newly launched literary magazine This Quarter was dedicated to Pound with the first issue including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. Pound published Cantos 17, 18, and 19 in the winter editions. Shortly thereafter he stopped writing for about 18 months although he was busy during this period: his opera Le Testament de Villon was performed in Paris; he became interested in the writings of John Reed; and prepared for publication Collected Poems 1926. In 1927 Pound's hope for launching a literary magazine was realized when The Exile went to press in March. According to biographer James J. Wilhelm, "Pound's journal burned brightly" during its first year with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. With the exception of his own Canto XXIII, Wilhelm claims the poorest writing came from Pound himself in the form of rambling editorials about Confucianism and that here "the seeds of religious intolerance were clearly showing roots". Only four issues of the magazine were published. Pound continued to work on Fenellosa's manuscripts and in 1928 won the Dial poetry of the year award for the translation of Confucius' poem Ta Hio. A limited edition (200 copies) of Pound's Cantos XXX was published in 1930. At age 44 he had devoted 15 years to the work.

In the 1930s Pound came to believe the solution to the economic crisis of the Great Depression was social credit, and that rapid economic reform was required to prevent another war. Left-wing fascism was the solution to reform he believed, and he became annoyed that his friends perceived him "as an apologist for Mussolini and facist Italy". Pound scholar Leon Surette notes that Pound turned to contemporary books to gain insight into economic theory, yet this led to confusion because "orthodox economics of his day had no solution for the disaster of the world depression". His correspondence shows a shift in his ideas on economics towards usury and antisemitism. Determined to spread the message of economic reform he presented a series of lectures about economics, before becoming drawn into politics. Convinced he had influence he contacted politicians in the United States with policies on areas such as education, interstate commerce and international affairs.

When in 1927 Olga met Mussolini she had been impressed with his knowledge of modern art; consequently Pound believed in Italy he had found a government that treated artists with importance. Against advice from Hemingway, on 30 January 1933 Pound met with Mussolini and within weeks began work on The ABC of Economics, and Jefferson and/or Mussolini. In 1935 the Italian government asked for a series of radio speeches on the subject of "the economic triumph of fascism"; and when in 1936 the Ministry of Propaganda again offered Pound a weekly radio broadcast he refused, saying "I don't care a hoot about talking over the radio".

In 1936 James Laughlin—who had visited Pound in Rapallo in 1933 as a 20-year-old student—started his publishing company New Directions. He acted as an agent for Pound, finding publications to accept his work and writing reviews of Pound's work. At the end of the decade he acquired the rights to The Cantos and published Cantos LII–LXXI in 1940, although Pound refused his demand to excise antisemitic content. According to Wilhelm, Pound's burgeoning antisemitism became most apparent in Canto 34. A number of Pound's books were published in the 1930s including an American edition of A Draft of Cantos XXX, Eleven New Cantos, the English edition of The ABC of Reading, English editions of Social Credit: An Impact and Jefferson and/or Mussolini; and in 1938 A Guide to Kulchur.

When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938, Dorothy, who was ill and unable to travel to London, asked Pound to organize the funeral, clean out the house and provide care for their son Omar. At the funeral 12-year-old Omar met his father for the first time. During his month-long stay in London while visiting Eliot, Lewis and others, Pound hinted at returning to the United States. Back in Italy he joined Olga and Mary in Rome and then sailed for New York with the intention of stopping American involvement in World War II. Pound traveled directly to Washington, D.C. where he met with cabinet members, senators and congressmen. He offered his services to Senator Borah to work for the country in an official capacity. According to biographer Noel Stock, "Pound was depressed because he was not having the success in Washington that he thought he might have". He left Washington to receive an honorary Ph.D from Hamilton College. A week later he returned to Italy. At the outbreak of World War II in September, Pound began a furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier: the war, he claimed, was the result of an international banking conspiracy and usury and the United States should "keep out of it".

World War II

By 1939 Pound's writing became increasingly antisemitic. A year later he translated Italy's Policy for Social Economics for Odon Por which he believed was a good example of the implementation of social credit in Italy. Because he felt his efforts to thwart the war and his economic philosophy were being ignored, he approached Rome Radio with the idea of making weekly radio broadcasts. Stock notes that by 1940 Pound was living in isolation; he believes Pound may have felt alone intellectually, a man obsessed with his ideas. He was geographically isolated from his homeland, and England, by virtue of living in an Axis country. For the first time in decades he faced the necessity to earn a living: Dorothy's income stopped coming from England, Homer's pension checks arrived late or not at all, and his royalty checks were stopped because of the war.

In September 1940, he considered leaving Italy but, as he wrote a friend, "thought of going to U.S. to annoy 'em, but Clipper won't take anything except mails until Dec. 15. So am back here at the old stand." In 1941 Pound tried on two separate occasions to leave Italy with Dorothy: on the first he was denied passage on by plane, the second time they were refused on a diplomatic train out of the country. The prospect of leaving, with his mother, his father (who was disabled from a recent hip fracture), his wife, his lover and his daughter (who did not have an American passport), was becoming increasingly difficult. In February 1942, his father Homer died.

Pound speaking, and I think I am perhaps speaking a bit more to England than to the United States .... They say an Englishman's head is made of wood and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to get something into the American head but nigh impossible to make it stick there .... I don't know what good I'm doing.
— Portion of December 7 1941 radio broadcast from Italy.

From 1941 to 1943 Pound made 100 radio broadcasts from Rome to America on shortwave, with a two month interlude after the United States entered the war in December 1941. In the broadcasts, Pound was critical of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was frankly antisemitic. Pound scholar Ira Nadel explains that in the Rome broadcasts Pound supported Mussolini and Hitler and he "developed a litany of antisemitic attitudes and remarks". However he often rambled about subjects such as his poetry, economics and Chinese philosophy, to the point that "the Italians suspected him of being an American agent." Pound scholar Wendy Flory believes from as early as 1935 Pound suffered from a mental illness manifested in the pronounced antisemitism of the radio broadcasts. She sees the broadcasts as "disorganized rantings reflecting his confused and delusional attitude". He pre-recorded the 10 to 15 minute broadcasts, received about $18 for each one that aired and received a free rail pass to travel from Rapallo to Rome. The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government with transcripts, now stored in the Library of Congress, made of them. Pound was indicted in absentia for treason by the United States government in 1943.

Mugshot of Pound taken upon his arrival at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa

When the Allied forces landed in Sicily in July 1943 Pound was in Rome. Worried about his daughter Mary's safety in German occupied Tyrol, he borrowed a sturdy pair of boots, and walked approximately 450 miles north to see her. When Pound found Mary he chose at that time to admit he had a wife and a son who lived in London. He stayed long enough for his feet to heal but was at risk for arrest by the German police, and soon returned south to Olga and Dorothy. In 1944 Pound and Dorothy were evacuated from their Rapallo home. Pound intended for Dorothy to live with his mother Isabel in Rapallo, while he joined Olga in Sant'Ambrogio. Instead Dorothy chose to live with Pound and Olga. Olga took a job in an Ursuline school; Dorothy who had not learned Italian after almost two decades in the country was forced to learn to shop and cook.

On 2 May 1945, when Dorothy and Olga were out on errands, armed partisans arrived while Pound was at work on a translation. He stuffed the copy of Confucius in his pocket and allowed himself to be taken "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest". He demanded to be taken to the Americans, and was brought to the U.S. command in Lavagna. The next day the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogated him in Genoa. Safe and well-fed at Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters, Pound requested permission to contact President Truman via telegram to offer his assistance in negotiations with Japan, given his knowledge of Japanese culture, and to be allowed to finish a prepared radio broadcast that recommended a post-war policy of leniency toward Italy and Germany. His requests were denied and the broadcast forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover.

On 24 May he was transferred from Genoa to a United States Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa where he was treated as a war criminal. Considered a suicide risk, for 25 days he was kept in an open steel cage to allow observation where, it is believed, he suffered a nervous breakdown. While in the cage his sole distraction was the copy of Confucius. Later he was transferred to a tent where for a period he was "deprived of all reading matter but religious tracts". He underwent three psychiatric evaluations, was given reading material and began to write again. He drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. The existence of a few sheets of toilet paper on which the beginning of Canto LXXXIV is written suggests that he began the poem while still in the cage.

On 15 November 1945 Pound was transferred from Italy to the United States. An escorting officer's impression of him was that "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives."

St. Elizabeths

On 25 November 1945 Pound was arraigned in Washington D.C. on charges of treason. The list of 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 agitated at the arraignment and remanded to a Washington D.C. hospital where he underwent psychiatric evaluation.

is obviously crazy .... He deserves punishment and disgrace, but what he really deserves is ridicule. He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of .... It is impossible to believe anyone in his right mind could utter the vile and utterly idiotic drivel he has broadcast.
— Ernest Hemingway on Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths.

A week later he was admitted to St. Elizabeths hospital and assigned to a lunatic ward where he stayed until February 1947. Unable to renew her passport, Dorothy did not arrive until June 1946, when her 'legally incompetent' husband was placed in her charge. She was allowed infrequent visits until his move to Chestnut Ward the following year—the result of her legal appeal—after which she visited him each day until his release. He began to correspond and receive visitors including Olga Rudge, while Mary, now married, began to translate his work into Italian.

During 1946 and 1947 he submitted portions of the Pisan Cantos to a number of literary magazines. Laughlin published an edition in 1948, followed by Faber in 1949. In 1948, the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry was awarded to the Pisan Cantos. Following public outraged at the award to a convicted fascist and antisemite, Nadel wrote that "no book of twentieth-century American poetry created more controversy than the Pisan Cantos", Pound continued his translation of Confucius, published in 1950. By the mid-1950s his privileges were increased and he received visitors including Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. Olga visited again in 1952 and Mary a year later, spending the time with her father helping to organize his work. Stock claims Pound was then "more widely appreciated than any other time". He was visited by Hugh Kenner whose The Poetry of Ezra Pound, published in 1951, was influential in the later reassessment of his poetry. In 1954 Pound was considered for a Nobel Prize in Literature although Hemingway eventually won. Hemingway remarked that it "would be a good year to release poets".

For many years Archibald MacLeish and Eliot led the effort to have Pound released. Robert Frost and Hemingway lent their support, but the effort stalled when white extremist John Kasper—who had often visited Pound—ran an "Ez for Prez" campaign. Hemingway believed Pound was incapable of abstaining from political statements and, as he wrote to MacLeish, "could see the media all too easily needling Pound into racist statements". Despite this, Hemingway sought Pound's release and sent a check for $1,500—which Pound never cashed, but had made into a paper-weight. In 1958 Pound hired an attorney to request dismissal of the indictment. It took a jury only minutes to decide in favour of release and he was discharged on 7 May 1958.

Both his insanity plea and incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital continue to be controversial. E. Fuller Torrey believes he received special treatment from Winfred Overholser, the superintendent at St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital where he wrote books, received visits from literary figures and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife. Although she concedes that a reflective analysis of Pound's actions may be construed as apologist, Flory disagrees and argues against the notion that national antisemitism can be mitigated by the idea of Pound as 'National Monster'. She writes, "A commonly held conspiracy theory explains that, with the connivance of the superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Pound faked insanity to avoid possible execution. In fact his medical records, letters and the testimony of many visitors to St. Elizabeths, show clear evidence of psychosis, as this is now defined." Although Tim Redman, author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, finds the conspiracy theory unconvincing he concedes the possibility that "Pound's insanity plea was concocted by his friends".

Return to Italy and death

Two months later Pound arrived with Dorothy in Naples, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute by the waiting press. He and Dorothy lived with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen—where he met his grandchildren for the first time—and then later returned to Rapallo.

Pound's grave on the cemetery island of San Michele, Venice

By December 1959 he had "fallen into a profound, at times, suicidal depression", insisted his work was worthless and The Cantos were "botched". A move to Rome seemed to bring a brief respite. In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, Pound explained much about his life. He claimed to have conceived the idea for The Cantos as early as 1905, and discussed the difficulty of living in London on a small income. He described a childhood memory of "the sight of money being shoveled at the Philadelphia Mint", and admitted progress on The Cantos was stuck while his health was poor. Soon thereafter he fell into silence that was infrequently broken for much of the rest of his life.

A few months later he was briefly admitted to a clinic near Brunnenberg and returned there in July 1961 after refusing to eat. He was furious on learning Olga and Mary were readmitting him to the clinic, and a few days later learning of Hemingway's suicide he "went into a terrible tantrum, said American writers were all doomed, and the USA destroys all of them, especially the best of them". He was diagnosed with prostate and urinary problems, and moved to Rapallo for medical care. According to Wilhelm, Dorothy was too frail to continue tending her husband and he went to live with Olga until his death. Flory believes Pound's mental breakdown was a manifestation of his psychosis, temporarily mitigated during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths. However those close to him attribute the breakdown to senile dementia. Whatever the cause, Pound clung to life for another decade, which he attributed to Olga's influence.

William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T.S. Eliot. Pound attended Eliot's funeral in London and during the trip traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow. During the mid-1960s he continued to travel and to give occasional public poetry readings. Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in 1967. Two years later Pound traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibition that featured his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land.

On his return to Italy he moved with Olga to Venice where he lived the last years of his life, mostly in silence, writing very little and growing increasingly frail. In the last week of October 1972 he and Olga attended a Noh play and a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. A few days later, on his birthday, he was too frail to leave his bedroom. The following night Olga had him brought to the hospital.

Ezra Pound died in Italy on 1 November 1972, at 87, and is buried on the island cemetery of San Michele in Venice. The following year Dorothy died in London. Olga Rudge died in 1996 and is buried next to Ezra.

Themes and style

"In a Station of the Metro"
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Example of Pound's minimalist imagism.

Opinion varies on the style of Pound's poetry. Critics generally agree that he was a strong lyricist, particularly evident in his early poetry. He drew on a variety of literature from medieval troubadour and ancient Chinese poetry to contemporary traditions. The shift to modernism appears as early as the poems published in Ripostes in 1912. Nadel claims Pound found in Imagism a foundation on which to build, and by which to reject Victorian poetic traditions: "Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ...replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics." Pound 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 with "the intensification of a single image". In its purest form Imagism was a form of minimalism, represented by his two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro". Yet minimalism did not lend itself to the epic, so he utilized the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.

The Cantos are difficult to define and to decipher. They are filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, obscenities of various sorts". Nadel argues they should be read as an epic, that is "a poem including history", and that the "historical figures lend referentiality to the text". They function as contemporary memoir, in which "personal history lyrical retrospection mingle", an idea most clearly represented in the Pisan Cantos. Michael Ingham sees an American tradition of experimental literature, and writes: "These works include everything but the kitchen sink, and then add the kitchen sink". In The Cantos, Pound mixes satire, diaries, hymns, elegies, essays, memoirs and more, disregarding the boundaries of literary genres. The Cantos rely on the use of ideogrammic translation, and the incorporation of up to 15 different languages. Ideas, cultures, and historical periods are layered with the juxtaposition of modern vernacular, Classical languages, and underlying truths often represented with Chinese ideograms. Albright believes the use of the term 'canto' is an "allegation of a comprehensiveness of design that was never likely to be evident"; hell was permanent for Dante whereas in Pound hell is "a state that is always collapsing".

A common criticism of The Cantos is their lack of coherence and form. Pound himself felt a lack of form to be his great failure, and said of the work "I cannot make it cohere". He redefined the nature of poetic translations for the 20th century, according to Pound scholar Ming Xie of the University of Beijing. Xie explains that Pound's first translation, of the Old English poem "The Seafarer", attracts either condemnation or defense. Pound's use of language in the translation is extremely deliberate, according to Xie, to avoid merely "trying to assimilate the original into contemporary language". 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 irrelevant. In his chapter "The Invention of China" from The Pound Era, Kenner contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems.

Pound's relationship to music is integral to his poetry. From his study of troubadour poetry—written to be sung and incorporating a "motz et son"—he believed all poetry should be written in a similar manner. In his essays, he wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit". Ingham compares the form of The Cantos to a fugue; although they do not adhere to the traditions of the form, they simultaneously explore multiple themes. In this, Ingham views the use of counterpoint as integral to the structure and cohesion of The Cantos. He believes The Cantos have occurrences of multi-voiced counterpoint and, with the juxtaposition of images, non-linear themes are developed. However the pieces are presented in fragments "which taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as music does".

Legacy

The three Cantos are not easy reading ... They are like an old Italian slope, where the very earth speaks of warriors and singers and lovers whose dust it is. They echo, they are haunted.
— 21 July 1918 New York Times review of Lustra.

Pound was in part responsible for advancing the careers of some the best-known modernist writers of the early-20th century. He befriended, helped, and influenced T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, George Oppen and Charles Olson. Pound scholar Hugh Witmeyer goes so far as to claim the Imagist movement "is the most important movement in English language poetry of the twentieth century", because every prominent 20th-century poet has applied imagist theories and practices.

Beyond his influence on the Imagist movement, Pound's legacy and reception are mixed. The Cantos have been described as a "shifting heap of splinters", and its "twisted forms" as nearly impossible to read. Eliot felt the need to publish an explanation of The Cantos as early as 1917; Zukofsky published another in 1929; and Laughlin added an explanation to Cantos LIII–LXXI in 1940. Conversely, The Cantos have been seen as a great achievement in 20th-century poetry with "syntax yielding to parataxis". Hugh Kenner said "there is no great contemporary writer who is less read than Ezra Pound". Peter Nichols, of the University of Sussex, believes a central facet of Pound's achievement is that his "work has suggested different paths to different poets". There was a Pound retrospective in the 1960s and 1970s, when critics such as Donald Davie and Hugh Kenner brought a new appreciation to his reputation and work. However, Michael Alexander writes in The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound that "in Britain a wider appreciation of his ...poetry has not yet arrived"; whereas in the United States, Pound scholarship is growing. Alexander believes Pound's full achievement has not yet been established; the body of his work continues to be studied and defined, but particularly in Britain it has yet to be made accessible.

Perhaps no English poem since the time of Alexander Pope has stirred so much fuss as the Pisan Cantos ...however, the poem in this case in not so much the thing as the unsavory political history of its author.
—excerpt from August 1949 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about the Bollingen Prize controversy.

Pound's antisemitism is central to an evaluation of his poetry and even whether his poetry will be read. The outrage at Pound was so deep that the imagined method of his execution—hanging or shooting—dominated the discussion. Arthur Miller considered Pound 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". Angry condemnation continues to be a common response to Pound the person and Pound the poet. The response went to so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists and not until the 1980s have critics begun a re-evaluation of Pound. In her essay "Pound and antisemitism", Wendy Flory argues that Pound represented an ingrained but unacknowledged national antisemitism, and his vilification as "National Monster" mitigated national guilt. She claims that Pound's antisemitism served "as a convenient placeholder for all those whose antisemitism was not being confronted".

The Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize—administered the first and last time by the Library of Congress—in 1949 to much controversy; the media claimed that the award equated support for antisemitism. In August 1949, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said of Pound's poetry that it "'cannot convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry'"; and the article claimed that "art today cannot be divorced from political sentiment". Those who contested the prize believed the spirit of New Criticism had been taken too far. Flory's view is that the best way of examining and analyzing The Cantos is to separate the poetry from Pound's antisemitism, although she concedes that the approach is perceived as apologetic.

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 (the Noh theatre). 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.

Selected list of works

Main article: Ezra Pound bibliography

Notes

  1. Thaddeus Pound served as Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, was three-time member of the United States Congress and a candidate for Secretary of the Interior under President James A. Garfield. Thaddeus supported the McKinley Tariff, was opposed to the free silver movement, disagreed with laissez-faire ideology and backed government economic regulation. See Redman 1999, pp. 250–251
  2. Margaret Cravens may have given Pound as much as two-thirds of her income, which he kept secret from his family and from Dorothy's family. Cravens committed suicide a year later, after hearing the news of Pound's unofficial engagement to Dorothy and Rummel's engagement to her former piano teacher. She listened to a tune written by Pound and Rummel as she took her life. See Dennis 1999, p. 267
  3. The two had been unofficially engaged since 1911, with Dorothy adhering to social convention and waiting for her father's permission to marry. See Dennis 1999, p. 267
  4. Paul Mellon of the Pittsburgh banking family donated the funds to the Library of Congress in 1949. A congressional hearing in August 1949 decided to remove the decision-making process from the Library of Congress.

References

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  120. Carpenter 1988, p. 587 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCarpenter1988 (help)
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  134. Wilhelm 1994, p. 203
  135. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 206–207
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  141. Stock 1970, pp. 417–422
  142. Stock 1970, pp. 424–424
  143. Nadel 2007, p. 17
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  158. ^ O'Connor 1963, p. 7
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  160. Witemeyer 1999, p. 47
  161. Nadel 1999, p. 2
  162. Nadel 1999, p. 2
  163. Nadel 1999, p. 3
  164. Albright 1999, p. 60
  165. ^ Nadel 1999, pp. 1–6
  166. Ingham 1999, p. 240
  167. Ming 1999, p. 217
  168. Albright 1999, pp. 76–77
  169. Nadel 1999, p. 8
  170. Nicholls 1999, p. 144
  171. Ming 1999, pp. 204–212
  172. Kenner 1971, p. 199 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKenner1971 (help)
  173. Ingham 1999, pp. 236–237
  174. Pound 1968, p. 103
  175. Ingham 1999, pp. 244–245
  176. "Ezra Pound, Poet of the state of Idaho". The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times. 21 July 1918. Retrieved 11 August 2010.
  177. Bornstein 1999, pp. 22–23
  178. Witmeyer 1999, p. 48 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFWitmeyer1999 (help)
  179. Nadel 1999, pp. 8–9
  180. qtd. in Nadel 1999, p. 13
  181. Nichols 1999, p. 264 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFNichols1999 (help)
  182. Alexander 1998, pp. 15–18
  183. ^ "Canto Controversy" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. August 22, 1949. Retrieved 2010-08-07.
  184. Flory 1999, p. 285
  185. qtd. in Flory 1999, p. 285
  186. Flory 1999, pp. 285–286
  187. Stock 1970, p. 426
  188. Flory 1999, pp. 294–295
  189. Alexander 1998, p. 208
  190. Alexander 1997, pp. 23–25

Sources

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