A student's guide to the Selected poems of Ezra Pound
(1979. Faber and Faber. No other dates or printing history...)
1979. Faber and Faber. No other dates or printing history. Book itself is just about like new except for pink marker line across top. Dust jacket has only minimal shelf wear. Very clean ad bright and tight. This is a used book.
Ezra Loomis Pound was an American poet and critic.
Background
He was born on October 30, 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, United States, a mining town full of rough prospectors with dynamite in their boots, which accommodated forty-seven taverns and one minister. Hailey was not the sort of place in which Pound's mother, Isabel Weston, could feel comfortable. A descendant of the Weston and the Wadsworth families, Weston had been raised in Washington, and was accustomed to more genteel circumstances.
Pound's father, Homer, a mild, unassuming, cheerful man, was the son of Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a dynamic and enterprising figure who built railroads, had been acting governor of Wisconsin, and had been elected to Congress three times.
The Pound family moved to Wyncote, an exclusive suburb of Philadelphia, in 1891. As an only child, young Ezra was pampered by his mother, who arranged his hair in curls. As a boy he was bookish and called "the professor" by his friends. He had written his first poem, about William Jennings Bryan, at the age of eleven, and a year later, in 1898, a wealthy aunt took him and his parents on a three-month tour of London, Paris, and Venice that left an indelible impression on him. He also traveled to Europe with his father in 1901.
Education
Pound's early education was at the nearby Cheltenham Military Academy and at Cheltenham High School. "A lanky whey-faced youth" as Pound remembered himself in his autobiographical account Indiscretions (1923), he was admitted in 1901 to the University of Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen on the strength of his Latin. Both at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College in upstate New York where he transferred in his junior year, young Pound was an outsider, interested in the esoterics of ancient European languages and in writing poetry. He graduated from Hamilton in June 1905. Upon his return to the University of Pennsylvania he began graduate work.
Pound received his M. A. degree in June 1906. His graduate studies were frustrated because Pound realized he could never fit into academic decorum. He was awarded a fellowship to travel in Europe in the summer of 1906, but he had become contentiously outspoken and irreverent in class, and he had the habit of distributing verse caricaturing his professors. After that first summer, the fellowship was not renewed.
Career
Pound presented a group of love poems bound in vellum and entitled "Hilda's Book" to Hilda Doolittle. His courtship of H. D. was stymied by her father, a professor of astronomy at the university, who declared with some justification that Pound was "only a nomad" and unsuitable as a prospective son-in-law.
Pound found a job teaching French, Spanish, and Italian at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, in the fall of 1907. Pound was altogether too flamboyant for the small, provincial town. He would say outrageous things in class just to make sure that his students were listening, and instead of conducting an introductory class in Italian made his students study Dante.
His career at Wabash College was aborted when the spinster sisters who ran his boardinghouse discovered that he had spent the night in his rooms with an itinerant actress. Summarily dismissed, but paid for a full year, Pound sailed in March 1908 to Europe on a cattle boat. In Venice he published a collection of his own poems, which he sent to William Butler Yeats and other important poets in England and America, and which he reviewed himself under a pseudonym in the London Evening Standard. Called A Lume Spento, the title refers to the son of one of the Roman Catholic popes who had been buried with extinguished candles because of his heretical views.
Pound went to London in the summer of 1908 and, to support himself, devised a course on Provençal literature which he taught at the Regent Street Polytechnic, a vocational college that had expanded to offer courses for the working class. An English publisher had brought out a collection of Pound's poems entitled Personae in 1909, and although Ford complained that Pound's verse in general suffered from a stilted, affected, and overliterary quality, the volume was very well received in London and the United States.
At the same time Pound had joined a group known as the Poet's Club, which, under the leadership of a burly, florid Englishman named T. E. Hulme, was concerned with the ways that modern poetry could depart from Romantic and Victorian diffuseness, and replace the ornateness and flourishes of nineteenth century poetry with a bare hardness. Pound's response to Hulme's notions was Imagism, a compact poetry based on finite experiences that could be tactily and sensuously described in as few words as possible. In 1909 and 1911, when Pound was publishing his collections Exultations and Canzoni, such notions were controversial.
Yeats was impressed by the tautness of the new poetry Pound was practicing, and invited him to spend parts of three winters from 1913 to 1915 at Stone Cottage, Yeats's country home, to explain his new approach. Pound's years in England were marked by his notable influence on the literary world. He was the London editor of Poetry from 1912, literary editor of the Egoist (1914 - 1919), and foreign editor of the Little Review (1917 - 1919).
He also supported himself as a music and art critic for a magazine called The New Age, and began to associate with novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis and the members of his Rebel Art Centre, where at an art opening Pound appeared on a balcony with a banner proclaiming the end of the Christian era.
At the end of 1920, Pound and his wife left England for Paris, where they lived until the fall of 1924. Pound's friends were the expatriate literati, including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Pound wrote the music to an opera, continued working on The Cantos, helped reshape his friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and also met Olga Rudge, an American violinist who became his mistress. Near the end of 1924, Pound and his wife resettled in Rapallo, a town on the Mediterranean coast of Italy in which Yeats had been wintering.
During the next fifteen years Pound devoted himself to the labors of The Cantos and the study of Chinese and Confucius. The poems were published as they were completed, and the texture of The Cantos became increasingly dense and complex.
After the American invasion of Italy, in the spring of 1945, Pound was incarcerated in the Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa with only his copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket. He was placed in an exposed cell, a solitary prisoner under a perpetual searchlight. Even the guard who brought him his food was not permitted to speak to him. After three weeks of confinement, he was stricken with the violent and hysterical terrors of a nervous breakdown. Transferred to the medical compound and in the hands of the camp psychiatrists, Pound had access to a typewriter and began work on the Pisan Cantos (1948), creating some of his most poignant and personal verse.
Later, in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, Pound was regularly interviewed by psychiatrists whom he saw as instruments in a Jewish conspiracy. Despite his support of the Italian fascists, he became a sort of icon of resistance for American writers, who visited him regularly during the twelve years of his incarceration. Dorothy Pound visited daily, bringing him the books he needed to continue work on The Cantos. Pound's release from the hospital was finally won in 1958, but only after sustained pressure from friends like Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway.
Upon his release, at the age of seventy-two, his publisher James Laughlin brought him to a recording studio where he read his poems. In 1958, he returned to Italy, where his health began to fail. When he was interviewed in 1959 by poet Donald Hall for The Paris Review, he spoke mostly in fragments.
For ten years he entered what he called "the silence, " a decade during which he rarely spoke to anyone. He died in Venice, Italy.
Pound admired Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy who had expediently sacrificed individual freedoms for the sake of prosperity.
Views
Pound's key idea was that the image could no longer be used ornamentally as Tennyson had used it, but had to be organic, vital, and central to the speech of ordinary people.
Personality
High strung, impatient, mercurial, and exuberant, Pound contemptuously dismissed much of the poetry he read as crippled by "painted adjectives" and "emotional slither. "
Connections
He married Dorothy Shakespear on April 20, 1914. He had a mistress Olga Rudge. When Olga Rudge gave birth to a daughter in 1925, Dorothy Pound reciprocated with a son in 1926. By 1961, although he hadn't divorced his wife, Dorothy, he was living with Olga Rudge, who had a small house next to Arturo Toscanini's in Venice.