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Ezra Pound. An introduction

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is generally spoken of as an American writer, although he lived over half his life in Europe and declared a preference for older cultures that foster and appreciate the arts. Indeed, he found a congenial culture in Mussolini’s Italy where his association with the fascist regime led to eventual incarceration in a mental asylum.

His circle of literary acquaintances included W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway – three of whom received the Nobel Prize for Literature – and he was undoubtedly generous in helping fellow writers to improve their works and publish; but Pound’s outspoken opinions led to arguments and the loss of friends. A much quoted line, written before moving to France in 1920, described Britain as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth.’ Such remarks were remembered to his discredit.
Pound was born in Idaho shortly before his family moved to Philadelphia where his father was employed in the Government Mint. His great-aunt took him on a three-month tour of Europe at the age of 13. He studied Romance Languages and Old English at the University of Pennsylvania then took a teaching post at a Presbyterian school in Indiana. After a year he was asked to leave because he had entertained a woman to his room. He set off for Europe and paid for the publication of his first book of poems, A Lume Spento (1908) in Venice, then moved to London where he was noted for his wit and learning and almost dandyish good looks.

He became acquainted with Ford Madox Ford, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme and Hilda Doolittle – joining the Poets’ Club in which Hulme was prominent. In 1914 he married Dorothy Shakespear who was the daughter of Yeats’ friend Olivia Shakespear. Also, shortly before the outbreak of war, he met the newly-arrived Thomas Stearns Eliot and was impressed with his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which appeared in the magazine Poetry in 1915. It was in Poetry that Pound declared he had discovered the most significant writer of modern times – James Joyce – and arranged for publication of Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man in 1916.

Pound was working on two well-known poems at the end of the war – Homage to Sextus Propertius, which first appeared in Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). He then moved to Paris where he befriended the young Ernest Hemingway and helped him finish a collection of short stories concerning his war experience as an ambulance driver in Italy (Hemingway had been declared unfit for military service). T. S. Eliot completed his poem The Waste Land and dedicated it Pound, asking for his comments and criticism. Pound cut the poem almost in half. The Eliot/Pound Waste Land appeared in 1922, the same year as Joyce’s Ulysses. While in Paris, Pound also developed his interest in music and wrote an opera libretto.

In 1939 Pound went to the USA for a short time in order to speak against American involvement in the coming war. On return to Italy he began the series of radio broadcasts which were to result in his arrest and imprisonment. Pound urged Americans to read their own Constitution and not be bamboozled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and London capitalists and Levantine usurers who promote wars in order to sell munitions. His message often appeared to be the Biblical one that the love of money is the root of all evil.

Was his message treasonable in content? From the British point of view it gave aid and succour to the enemy, which was treason. The political compromise was for Pound to be declared unfit to plead. He was sentenced to indefinite detention in an asylum for the criminally insane and spent 12 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. There were protests in 1949 when he received a literary award for his Pisan Cantos (1948) – cantos written while held in an Italian prison camp near Pisa in 1945.

In 1958 charges against him were dropped; he was released from the asylum and left for Italy. In appearance the aging Pound resembled a gaunt Old Testament prophet with a white beard, but his days of thunderous pronouncements were over. He lived quietly, spending time in Rapallo and Venice where he died at the age of 87.

Read the full version of this essay at literature-study-online.com

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