Ezra Loomis Pound was an American poet, translator, editor, critic, and esthetic propagandist whose life was surrounded by controversy.
Background
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on October 30, 1885 in the small mining town of Hailey, then a part of the Territory of Idaho. At the time of his birth, his father, Homer Loomis Pound, originally from Wisconsin, was employed as the Registrar of the General Land Office in Hailey.
Ezra’s mother, Isabel Weston, was from New York. She could not adjust to the life at Hailey and in 1887 she returned to New York, taking eighteen-month-old Ezra with her. Subsequently Homer too followed them. Ezra remained their only child.
In 1889, Homer was appointed an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint and with that the family moved to Jenkintown, located just outside the city.
Education
At Wyncote he was first enrolled at the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School. Later in 1894, he was moved to the Florence Ridpath School.
In 1897, Ezra Pound was admitted to Cheltenham Military Academy, where he studied Latin, English, history, arithmetic, marksmanship, and military drilling. Moreover, it was here that he learned the importance of submitting to the authority.
In 1900, he left the Academy to finish his high school education at Cheltenham Township High School, finally graduating from there in 1901.
In 1901 he began attending the University of Pennsylvania and then, two years later, transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from which he graduated in 1905. He received a master of arts degree from Pennsylvania in 1906
At the University of Pennsylvania he taught while engaged in his studies. Among his pupils was poet William Carlos Williams. After teaching French and Spanish at Wabash College, Indiana, Pound left for London in 1908 on a cattle boat, where he lived until 1920.
A Lume Spento (1908), Pound's first published volume, was followed in 1909 by Personae of Ezra Pound and Exultations of Ezra Pound. Most of his early work was late romantic in style, heavily imitative of Robert Browning, and probably influenced as well by his study of Provençal chansons.
The "credo" Pound stated in 1917, calling for a new "imagist" poetry of austerity, directness, and emotional freedom, a poetry "nearer the bone," was realized in the poem Portrait d'une femme, published in Ripostes (1912), which was probably inspired by Henry James's novel Portrait of a Lady and which may have influenced T.S. Eliot's later poem of the same name.
Pound founded and edited the revolutionary literary magazine Blast in 1914 and later became the European editor of Harriet Monroe's Chicago Poetry, using his influence to promote and encourage Eliot. Through his "creative translations" of Chinese poems in Cathay (1915) and his "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1918 and 1919) Pound's characteristic mature style gradually emerged. By the time Hugh Selwyn Mauberley appeared in 1920, with its echoes of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Pound had achieved his artistic maturity.
In 1918 Pound began investigating the causes of World War I, the earliest evidence of his lifelong obsession with economic and political theory, to explain the failures of modern democratic society.
From 1920 to 1924 Pound lived in Paris, where he was associated with Gertrude Stein and her brilliant circle of American expatriates. He dominated the avant-garde literary movements of the period. He moved to Italy in 1924, where he spent most of the rest of his life. The first of the Cantos, his magnum opus, appeared in 1925. In the years before World War II he published, in addition to his poetry, books on economics, art, and Oriental literature and lectured at the Bocconi University in Milan on Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren.
In 1941 Pound began to broadcast propaganda from Rome attacking the American war effort. Pound was returned to the United States in 1945 under indictment for treason but never stood trial. After his lawyer successfully entered a plea of insanity, Pound was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. His Pisan Cantos were given the Bollingen Award in 1949, largely through the influence of Eliot, who, along with William Carlos Williams and many other prominent figures in American letters, was instrumental in having Pound's indictment dismissed in 1958. That same year Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's under a storm of controversy and returned immediately to Italy. When Pound returned to Naples he gave a fascist salute to assembled photographers and claimed he was the greatest living poet.
He returned to his home in Merano and began gardening, planting grapes and, of course, writing. This period in his life was cut short by a heart attack in 1962. Afterwards he became very elusive and rarely talked to anyone. He continually worked on one singular project, trying to find a "paradise" to end his Cantos series. He took long walks along the streets of Venice and, as friends said, tried to come to terms with himself and his life. Pound died on November 1, 1972 in Venice's Civil Hospital from an intestinal blockage after falling ill at his home near St. Mark's Square.
Pound came to believe that the cause of World War I was finance capitalism, which he called "usury", that the solution lay in C. H. Douglas's idea of social credit, and that fascism was the vehicle for reform.
Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, he maintained his views in private. He refused to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, dismissed people he disliked as "Jews", and urged visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination.
Views
Pound's early imagism, a confused and ambiguous esthetic, was an attempt to make poetry scientifically respectable. Through it he hoped to be able to present in verbal images the exact equivalent of the actual object described, so that the experience of the poem would create in the reader the same sensations caused by direct experience of the object itself. Pound never acknowledged the amount of conscious and unconscious selection and control that went into the making of an imagist poem, and his own work exemplified a personalism that belied his objectivist theory. He never admitted, even to himself, that the creations of the human mind must invariably be conditioned by the process of that mind.
Quotations:
"America is a lunatic asylum."
"Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views."
"I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible."
"The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth."
"The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people."
"All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty."
"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Wilson wrote:
"Ezra Pound is really at heart a very boyish fellow and an incurable provincial. It is true that he was driven to Europe by a thirst for romance and color that he could scarcely have satisfied in America, but he took to Europe the simple faith and pure enthusiasm of his native Idaho... His sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious, he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself..."
In 1999 Surrette wrote about the state of Pound criticism, that "the effort to uncover coherence in a... crazy quilt of verse styles, critical principles, crankish economic theories and distasteful political affiliations has made it difficult to perceive the genesis and development of any of these components. " He emphasized that Pound's "economic and political opinions have not been properly dated, nor has the suddenness of his radicalization been appreciated."
Hemingway wrote: "The best of Pound's writing - and it is in the Cantos - will last as long as there is any literature."
In 1933 Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children."
Interests
Politicians
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler
Connections
Ezra Pound married Dorothy Shakespear on 20 April 1914, while he was a budding poet in London. They had one son Omar, who was raised by Dorothy’s mother Olivia Shakespear. Pound hardly knew him. He also had a life-long affair with American violinist Olga Rudge, whom he met in 1922 while he was living in Paris and with whom he had a daughter named Mary. Although Dorothy accepted the liaison, Mary never knew about her father’s other family until he told her just before his arrest.
Both the women Dorothy and Olga stood by him during his arrest and subsequent release. However, it was Olga who took care of Pound during the last eleven years of his life, while Dorothy lived in London with their son Omar. Unlike his relationship with Omar, Pound was close to Mary and lived with her for some time.