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Pound's education began in a series of dame schools, some of them run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892, the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893 and the Florence Ridpath school from 1894, also in Wyncote. His first publication (by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years) was a limerick in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election: "There was a young man from the West, / He did what he could for what he thought best; / But election came round, / He found himself drowned, / And the papers will tell you the rest."

Between 1897 and 1900 Pound attended Cheltenham Military Academy, sometimes as a boarder, where he specialized in Latin. The boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and besides Latin were taught English, history, arithmetic, marksmanship, military drilling and the importance of submitting to authority. He made his first trip overseas in the summer of 1898 when he was 13, a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and Frances Weston (Aunt Frank), who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. After the academy he may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for one year, and in 1901, aged 15, he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts. He would write in 1913, in "How I Began":

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It was at Pennsylvania that he met Hilda Doolittle – the daughter of the professor of astronomy – who went on to become the poet known as H.D. 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 Imagism movement in London. He sought her hand and in February that year asked her father, the astronomy professor Charles Doolittle, for his permission to marry. Doolittle was a curt man, described as "donnish" and intimidating. He was aware of Pound's reputation as a ladies man, and unimpressed by his career as a poet, and constant moving. Doolittle's response was dismissive, he replied, "What! … Why you’re nothing but a nomad!" Nonetheless Pound asked her to marry him in the summer of 1907, and though rejected, 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.

References

1. Moody (2007), xiii
2. Rachewiltz, Moody and Moody (2011), x; the limerick was published on 7 November 1896.
3. Moody (2007), 8–9
4. Moody (2007), 14; for Cheltenham Township High School, see McDonald (2005), 91, and Stock (1970), 11
5. Doolittle (1979), 67–68
   • Hilda's Book is in the Houghton Library at Harvard; see "Poems and Translations", Library of America.
6. Tytell (1987), 24–28; for dedication of Personae see Nadel (1999), xviii