Background

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only and much-adored child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858—1942) and Isabella Weston (1860—1948). Both parents' ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, John Pound, a Quaker, had sailed from England around 1650. His grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound (1832—1914), was a retired Republican Congressmen for north-west Wisconsin who had started life as a farm boy and made a fortune in the lumber business, though he lost it again and died penniless. His son Homer, Pound's father, worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business, after which Thaddeus secured him an appointment as head of the Government Land Office in the Wild West town of Hailey.

On his mother's side, William Wadsworth, a Puritan, had left England for Boston on the Lion in 1632. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York, and Harding Weston and Mary Parker produced Isabel Weston, Pound's mother. She was used to a more sophisticated urban life and was unhappy with the move to Hailey, so Homer gave up his job in 1887 when Pound was two. They lived for a year with her relatives, Ezra Brown Weston and his wife Frances, at 24 East 47th Street, Manhattan, and the next year with Thaddeus Pound in Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin. In 1889 Homer accepted a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint, and the family moved to 417 Walnut Street in nearby Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, then in July 1893 bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in the WASP-ish town of Wyncote.

Education

Pound's early education took places in a series of private schools in people's homes, some of them run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892; the Misses Heacock's Chelten Hills school in Wyncote in 1893; and the Florence Ridpath school from 1894, which became the Wyncote Public School a year later. From 1898 until 1900 he attended the Cheltenham Military Academy, sometimes as a day boy and sometimes boarding, though he did not graduate. The boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and were taught military drilling, how to shoot, and the importance of submitting to authority. Pound was clever, independent-minded, conceited, and unpopular.

He said he knew early on that he wanted to be a poet, and his first publication was in 1896, a limerick in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle on 7 November about an American politician, William Jennings Bryan...by E.L. Pound, Wyncote, Aged 11 years: "There was a young man from the West,/He did what he could for what he thought best." His first trip overseas came two years later when he was 13, a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and Aunt Frances, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts in 1901 at the age of 15:

I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by translation and...scarcely less important...what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with "requirements for degrees."

It was at Pennsylvania that he met Hilda Doolittle...the daughter of the university's professor of astronomy...who became a poet known as H.D., thanks to Pound's choice of a name for her. She wrote in 1979 that she had felt their lives were irrevocably intertwined; 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 poetry movement in London. Their relationship was sometimes collegial, sometimes amorous, and in the summer of 1907 he asked her to marry him, though her father refused permission. He 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 too that summer, but she turned him down.

His parents and Frances Weston took him on his second three-month European tour in 1902, after which he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York...possibly because of poor grades...where he studied the Provençal dialect with William Pierce Shephard and Anglo-Saxon with Joseph D. Ibbotson. David Moody writes that it was at Hamilton with Shephard that he read Dante: "Got more mediaeval philosophy in one canto of Dante's Paradise than I ever expect to get again," he told his mother in 1904. Out of the discussions about Dante emerged the idea for a long poem in three parts...dealing with emotion, instruction, and contemplation...which although it was never written planted the seed for The Cantos.

He graduated with a BPhil in 1905, and in the fall of that year enrolled again at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert. He obtained his MA in the spring of 1906, and registered as a PhD student to write a thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays. The university awarded him a Harrison fellowship with a travel grant of $500 (today $}}), which he used to visit Europe again. He arrived in Gibraltar on May 7, then spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including one in the royal palace. He was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination on 31 May by anarchists of King Alfonso and his bride on their wedding day, and left the country for fear he would be identified with them. He moved on to Paris, spending two weeks attending lectures at the Sorbonne, followed by a week in the British Museum Reading Room in London. He returned to the U.S. in July, and his first published essay, Raphalite Latin, appeared in Book News in September, in which he committed himself to internationalism, arguing that provincialism was the enemy. Back at the university he apparently annoyed Felix Shelling, the head of English, with silly remarks during lectures...which included insisting that George Bernard Shaw was better than Shakespeare, and taking out an enormous tin watch and winding it with slow precision...and his fellowship was not renewed at the end of the year.

Teaching

In the fall of 1907 he took a job as a teacher of Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a conservative town that he called the sixth circle of hell, with an equally conservative college from which he was dismissed after deliberately provoking the college authorities. Smoking was forbidden, so he would smoke cigarillos in his office down the corridor from the President's. He annoyed his landlords by having friends round, including women, and was eventually caught in flagrante with one of them, although the details remain unclear and he denied any wrongdoing. One of the incidents involved a stranded chorus girl to whom he offered his bed for the night; when she was discovered the next morning by the landladies, Misses Ida and Belle Hall, his insistence that he had slept on the floor was met with disbelief, and he was asked to leave the college. He was glad to be free of the place, writing to his father, "I guess something that one does not see but something very big and white back of the destinies has the turning & the leading of things & this thing & I breathe again." It was the only job he ever had, living for the rest of his life on money from his father, his wife's allowance from her parents, gifts from patrons, his royalties and...for several controversial years...fees from Mussolini's government for the broadcasts that saw him arrested for treason.

Introduction to literary scene

He decided to return to Europe in February 1908, arriving by cattle boat in Gibraltar in April with $80 in his pocket. He sent poems to Harper's Magazine and began writing fiction that he hoped he could sell, and by the summer was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge. In July he self-published his first book of poetry, the 72-page A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent), which sold 100 copies at six cents each. The London Evening Standard called it "wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative." The title was from Dante's Purgatoria, and alluded to the death of a friend, the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, who died of consumption in his 20s.

In August he moved to London, where he ended up staying almost continuously for 12 years. He wanted to meet W.B. Yeats, the greatest living poet in Pound's view, and they became close friends, although Yeats was older by 28 years. He had sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had replied that he found it charming. Pound told William Carlos Williams, a friend from university: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Lord Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse...stirring, pompous, and propagandistic...popular with the public. James Knapp cites an example from Tennyson: "And here the singer for his art/Not all in vain may plead/'The song that nerves a nation's heart/Is in itself a deed.'" Knapp writes that Pound wanted to focus on the individual experience, the particular, the concrete, and rejected the idea of poetry as versified moral essay.

Arriving in the city with ?3 (today ?}}), he rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the West End. When he found it too expensive he moved briefly to Islington in the north, then when his family sent more money...another ?4...it was back to the West End and a room a penny bus-ride from the British Museum at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. The house (see right) sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance decades later in the Pisan Cantos, "concerning the landlady's doings/with a lodger unnamed/az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub". He persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews...publisher of Yeats's Wind Among the Reeds and the Book of the Rhymer's Club...to display A Lume Spento, and by October he was being discussed around town. In December he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for This Yule, and after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic, he managed to acquire a position lecturing in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street. Ford Madox Ford described him, apparently more in connotation than denotation, as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."

Meeting Dorothy Shakespeare

He met the novelist Olivia Shakespear...Yeats's former lover and the subject of his The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love...at a literary salon in February 1909, and was introduced to Dorothy, Olivia's daughter, who became his wife in 1914. The critic Iris Barry described Dorothy as carrying herself with the air of a young Victorian lady out skating. She lived with her mother, spending her days reading and doing needlework while she waited for a potential suitor. She was enthralled by Ezra, writing in her diary on 16 February:

::::::

Listen to it...Ezra! Ezra! And a third time...Ezra! He has a wonderful, beautiful face, a high forehead, prominent over the eyes; a long delicate nose, with little, red, nostrils; a strange mouth, never still & quite elusive; a square chin, slightly cleft in the middle...the whole face pale; the eyes grey-blue; the hair golden-brown, and curling in soft wavy crinkles. Large hands, with long, well-shaped fingers and beautiful nails.

The Shakespears were among a number of women who effectively became Pound's patrons. Through them he was introduced to Yeats, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and the rest of London's literary circle. Another patron was the American heiress Margaret Cravens, who after knowing him for just one or two days offered him such a large amount of money that he was able to focus entirely on completing The Spirit of Romance (1910), based on his notes from the evening lectures. Cravens killed herself in 1912, probably because the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, had married someone else, but possibly also because she learned of Pound's engagement to Dorothy, an engagement so unofficial that over the next few years Dorothy became increasingly angry about it. She had to abide by social convention, while Pound was free to roam, befriending and often bedding any woman he wanted.

Personae, Imagism, Ripostes

In June 1909 another collection, Personae, was published by Matthews. Several of the poems were from A Lume Spento, with 17 new ones, and it was his first publication to have any commercial success. It was reviewed by The Daily Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Observer and the Times Literary Supplement, among others; they said it was full of passion, magic, inspiration and "undoubtable promise." Rupert Brooke gave a negative review in The Cambridge Review. Pound had great talent, Brooke said, but had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman by writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths."

In September another 27 poems appeared as Exultations, and around the same time he moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914, and where he said the "Imagisme" movement was born in 1912. In June 1910 he returned for eight months to the United States, in part to try to persuade the New York Public Library, then being built, to change its design; The New York Times wrote that he went almost daily to the architects' offices to shout at them. Walter Rummel, whom he had met the previous spring, arrived for a visit and invited him to Paris for a collaboration on setting troubadour poetry to music. He began work on translating Cavalcanti and Daniel, but he was unhappy in New York. His essays about America were written during this period, and became the book Patria Mia, which remained unpublished until 1950. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later. He did not return to the United States for 28 years.

After a few days in London, he visited Paris again, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as a "medley of pretension." Through the project with Rummel he developed a greater interest in music, and began to focus on the role of rhythm and pitch in poetry. After returning to London in August 1911 he began work on the collection that became Ripostes, and A. R. Orage, the editor of the socialist journal The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column. Hilda Doolittle arrived in London, and Pound introduced her to the poet Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913. The three of them lived in Church Walk, and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room, where in the tearoom one afternoon they decided to start a movement, "Imagisme". The aim was to fight the Victorian use of abstraction, romanticism, symbolism, rhetoric, the inversion of word order, and the over-use of adjectives. One contemporary said: "The concrete image, unruled by an adjective, was a thing [Pound] would have died for. Rhetoric was a thing he would gladly have murdered." Imagisme, as they defined it, must adhere to three tenets:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.3. As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

An example of the style is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913). "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde," he wrote, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face." The poem reads in its entirety:

It is in Ripostes (1912) that Pound's poetry moved toward more contemporary language. The collection includes his translation of the eighth-century Old English poem "The Seafarer", which apparently upset scholars, as did his translations from Latin, Italian, French, and Chinese, either because of errors or because he lacked familiarity with the cultural context. Lionel Kelly writes that Pound produced a modern version of "The Seafarer" by recreating the sound of the words and the pattern of the rhythm, and that his translation practices were innovative and important. His translation from the Italian of Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti was also published in 1912.

He was 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 poems for the 64-page Des Imagistes, an anthology of Imagisme poets, published in February 1914, which included Joyce's "I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land." Of great importance was Pound's work on Ernest Fenollosa's papers, given to him to organize by Fenollosa's widow. Fenollosa, an American professor who had taught in Japan, had started translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays, with which Pound became fascinated. Eventually Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.

In November 1913 Yeats took Pound to stay with him in rooms he rented in Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, the first of three winters he spent there with Yeats, including one winter with Dorothy after they married. Pound was to act as his secretary and to read to him...Yeats's eyesight was failing...and they stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods, and fencing for exercise. Yeats was interested in the occult, and he had Pound read him stories about ghosts. "He will be quite sensible," Pound told a friend, "till some question of ghosts or occultism comes up, then ... quality of mind goes."

Marriage, BLAST

Pound married Dorothy on 20 April 1914, despite some opposition from her parents who were concerned about his lack of income. He was dependent on his earnings from literary magazines, particularly Poetry, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist, and was probably earning considerably less than £300 a year. Dorothy's income was £50 of her own, and £150 from her family. Her parents eventually agreed to the marriage, perhaps out of fear that Dorothy was getting older and no other suitor was in sight. Pound's concession to marry in church helped, though it came only after a frank exchange of views with Dorothy's father, Henry. "I would no more give up my faith in Christ than I should give up my faith in Helios or my respect for the teachings of Confucius," he wrote to Henry, "but I think this superficial conformity, an act which would amount, practically, to an outrageous lie at what should be one of [the] most serious moments of a man's life, interferes." Afterwards he and Dorothy moved into a room with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, near Church Walk, with the newly wed Hilda and Richard Aldington in the flat next door.

Pound began writing for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine BLAST, the first issue of which appeared in June 1914. An advertisment in The Egoist said it would discuss "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... 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 William Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that, "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace." Abercrombie suggested as their choice of weapon unsold copies of their own books. The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the Imagists, but Hilda and Richard were already moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he moved closer to Wyndham Lewis's ideas. When Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not included. He began to call Imagisme "Amygism," and in July 1914 declared it dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually Anglicized it.

First World War

Between 1914 and 1916 he helped to have James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man serialized in The Egoist then published in book form, and he persuaded Poetry to published T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in June 1915. Conrad Aiken writes that he had shown Prufrock to every conceivable editor in England, but it was dismissed as crazy. He eventually sent it to Pound who, Aiken writes, instantly saw that it was a work of genius and sent it to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. "[Eliot] has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN," Pound wrote to Monroe in October 1914. "The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both. Most of the swine have done neither. It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar."

In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a collection of translated Chinese poems gathered by Ernest Fenollosa. That he saw himself as an outsider is evident from his remarks on the last page: "There are also other poems... But if I give them ... 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 translation ... Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems".

It was in the summer of 1915 that he began to speak of working on his long poem. He told a friend in August: "It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan't," and in September told another that it was a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore." About a year later, he had the form of the first three attempts at Canto I, which he sent to Alice Henderson at Poetry in January 1917 but continued to work on into 1919.

He was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches in June 1915, and the next year he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, with letters, illustrations and photographs, establishing the sculptor's reputation. Publication of Lustra was stopped in 1917 when the editor Elkin Mathews objected to the tone, writing that it was "unsuitable for the innocent Young Person and the right-thinking Family". Pound refused any suggested revisions, and the volume was published as a private edition that June.

He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age under the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Little Review and The Egoist. 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 Arnaut. The volume of writing exhausted him, and he began to believe he was wasting his time with prose. He blamed American provincialism when the Comstock Laws...which made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail...were applied to The Little Review, suppressing the October 1917 issue, and again applied to stop the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses. In September 1917 T.E. Hulme was killed by shell fire in Flanders. In 1918, the Arnaut manuscript was lost at sea, and Pound became sick, presumably with the Spanish influenza. When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, he wandered among the crowds in Piccadilly, standing just two feet away from the King at one point, listening to the singing, and thinking, "the sense of rhythm is not dead in this island."

Disillusionment with England

The war 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 had been killed and Lewis severely wounded. Pound saw the Vorticist movement was finished and doubted his own future as a poet. In 1919 he collected and published his essays for The Little Review into a volume called Instigations, and published "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in Poetry. "Homage" is considered an example of modernism rather than strict translation; Moody describes it as "the refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". When Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, was told by a professor of Latin that Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", she decided to publish only the "more decorous parts". Outraged, Pound ended his association with her. His separation from Poetry signaled the culmination of the decline in his reputation, which had been damaged by the lack of compromise during the publication of Lustra, and was damaged again when The Little Review lost readership when he failed to find new interesting writers. By 1919, to his surprise, he found himself unemployed.

A summer trip to France with Dorothy confirmed his disillusionment. He returned to England to a meager income. He had only the New Age to write for, with other magazines ignoring his submissions or not reviewing his work. During the fall of 1919 and the early winter of 1920 he earned money through a series of articles for The New Age, attacking what he saw as the three enemies of artistic enlightenment: nationalism, capitalism and organized religion. It was in the New Age offices around this time that he first met Major C. H. Douglas, from whom he learned about social credit, a halfway house between capitalism and socialism, an idea in which he became increasingly interested. His poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)...about a poet whose life, like Pound's, has become sterile and meaningless...marked a farewell to his involvement in the London literary scene. He was disgusted by the lives lost during the war, and could not reconcile himself with it: "There died a myriad/And of the best, among them/For an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilisation".

During the war he had financially supported Joyce while the latter finished Ulysses, and in June 1920 he convinced Joyce, who was living in poverty and considering returning to Ireland, to join him in France. Pound gave him a suit and traveled with him to Paris, where he provided introductions and rented lodgings for the family. Six months later he and Dorothy also moved to Paris. A. R. Orage wrote in the January 1921 issue of The New Age:

... Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England: he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture ... With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful 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. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... by and large England hates men of culture until they are dead.

Unofficial minister of culture

The Pounds settled in Paris in January 1921. Ezra admitted in a letter that he was feeling uncertain about the future and intended to "plunge into gawd knows wot". Paris was inexpensive and a magnet to artists and writers. He became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, and befriended Basil Bunting. He met Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley at Sylvia Beach's bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company; Hemingway described him as "tall, with a scratchy red beard, fine eyes and strange haircuts". Pound wrote little: except for a "Paris Letter" he submitted to Dial, he published little else, spending his time instead building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Shakespeare and Company. In 1921, his Poems 1918—1921 were published by Boni and Liveright. In 1922 Eliot sent him a "welter of manuscripts" which included "The Waste Land"...now one of the English-language's most famous poems...then arrived in Paris to edit it with Pound. Pound blue-inked it with comments such as "too easy" and "make up yr. mind," and cut three long passages from it. Pound later described himself as the poem's "sage homme" ("male midwife"). Eliot wrote:

It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called "The Waste Land" which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius.

Pound had by now gained a reputation as an unofficial minister of culture, and blue-inked Hemingway's work as he had done for Eliot. Although Hemingway was 14 years younger than Pound, their relationship became one of mutual respect and they formed a strong friendship. Hemingway assumed the status of pupil to Pound's teaching. Pound and Dorothy lived in an inexpensive apartment at 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there introduced Hemingway to Lewis, Ford and Joyce. Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box, but as he told Sherwood Anderson, "[Pound] habitually leads with his chin and has the general grace of a crayfish ...". They toured Italy together in 1923, during which Hemingway had Pound visit Italian battlefields and explained to him the tactics of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in whom Pound found a hero to add to his Cantos.

Meeting Olga Rudge

Pound was 36 when he met the American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the fall of 1922, beginning a love affair that lasted 50 years. John Tytell writes that Pound had always felt there was a link between his creativity and his ability to seduce women, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over the years. He complained shortly after arriving in Paris that he had been there for three months without having managed to find a mistress. He was introduced to Olga, then 26 years old, at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Pound was glamorously dressed in a red jacket embroidered with gold dragons, and Olga 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 the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, whereas his friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.

The couple spent the following summer in the south of France, where Pound introduced her to "the land of the troubadours". He began to write music, and composed two complete operas, including Le Testament de Villon, working with George Antheil to apply the concepts of Vorticism to music. Helped by an English pianist, he picked out the rhythm of troubadour poetry; Olga was surprised at his musical sensibility and the way in which his seemingly unrelated pieces fitted together. He also wrote several pieces for solo violin, which Olga performed.

He continued to work on The Cantos, and wrote the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" in this period. The sequence introduces one of the major personae of the poem and reflects Pound's preoccupations with politics and economics. "Cantos IX-XII" were published in The Criterion, with two further cantos published in the first issue of Ford's transatlantic review in 1924. Pound secured funding for the review from the American attorney John Quinn, and it published works by Pound, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. Pound wrote music reviews for it that were later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.

Birth of the children

By 1924 Dorothy was complaining about the winters in Paris, and Pound's health was poor. At a dinner someone had randomly tried to stab him, and it underlined that their time in France was over. They decided to move to a quieter place, and choose Rapallo, Italy, a town with a population of 15,000. "Italy is my place for starting things," he told a friend. Many English writers went to Rapallo for the sun; John Keats had described it in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Olga Rudge followed them there, carrying Pound's child. She had no interest in marrying him or raising a child, but Tytell writes that she felt having his child would keep her connected to him. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 9 July 1925 in Bressanone, and handed the baby over to a peasant woman, Frau Marcher, whose own child had died, and who agreed to raise Mary for 200 lire a month.

There is no record of the effect the birth had on Dorothy, but five months later...after a three-month visit to Egypt alone...she became pregnant with a boy. Pound left Rapallo for Paris for the premiere of Le Testament de Villon taking Dorothy with him, without mentioning her pregnancy to his friends or parents, and on 10 September 1926 Hemingway drove her to the American Hospital in Paris, where Omar was born. In a letter to his parents in October Pound wrote, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well." Surprised and concerned, Homer and Isabel inquired about Dorothy and Omar in their letters, but Pound's responses were increasingly cryptic and eventually they gave up. Dorothy handed the baby over to her mother, Olivia, who raised him in London until he was old enough to go to boarding school. When Dorothy went to England each summer to see Omar, Pound would spend the time with Olga, whose father had bought her a house in Venice. The arrangement meant his children were raised very differently. Mary had one pair of shoes and books about Jesus and the saints, while Omar was raised as an English gentleman in Kensington by his sophisticated grandparents.

In 1925 the literary magazine This Quarter dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. Pound published Cantos 17—19 in the winter editions. Shortly after this he stopped writing for about 18 months, although he prepared his Collected Poems 1926 for publication. In March 1927 he launched his own literary magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. According to James J. Wilhelm, it 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 Canto XXIII, Wilhelm argues that the poorest writing came from Pound himself in the form of rambling editorials about Confucianism, and that the seeds of Pound's intolerance were showing roots. He continued to work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 won the Dial poetry of the year award for the translation of Confucius's poem Ta Hio. That year Homer and Isabel visited him in Rapallo. They had not seen him since 1914, and by then Homer had retired so they decided to move to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town. Pound told his father about Mary's existence, but Isabel was either not told about her or chose not to acknowledge her.

Turn to fascism

During the 1920s Pound came to believe that the solution to the economic crisis of the Great Depression was social credit. He believed fascism was the vehicle for economic reform, and became annoyed that his friends saw him as an apologist for Mussolini. Determined to spread the message of economic reform he presented a series of lectures on economics, and convinced of his influence made contact with politicians in the United States about education, interstate commerce and international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met Mussolini, presenting him a copy of Cantos XXX. As a result of the meeting he began work on two books, The ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

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 Pound's agent, finding publications to accept his work and writing reviews. 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 (1934), English editions of Social Credit: An Impact and Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and A Guide to Kulchur (1938).

When Dorothy's mother died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Pound to organize the funeral, clean out the house, and provide care for their 12-year-old son Omar, who met his father for the first time in eight years. He visited T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, and produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed for New York, believing he could stop America from involvement in the Second World War, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini while he lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. He traveled to Washington, D.C. where he met senators and congressmen. Mary said he did it out of a sense of responsibility, rather than megalomania; he was offered no encouragement, and left depressed and frustrated. William Carlos Williams, Pound's old friend from university, wrote in a letter: "The man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of fascism out of his brain during the next few years, which I seriously doubt that he can do." Pound left Washington to receive an honorary PhD from Hamilton College on 12 June, and a week later returned to Italy.

Second World War, radio broadcasts

When he returned he began writing anti-Semitic material for Italian newspapers, including one entitled "The Jews, Disease Incarnate." He wrote to his publisher, James Laughlin, to say that Roosevelt represents Jewry, and signed the letter "Heil Hitler." He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia." After war broke out in September 1939, he began a furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international banking conspiracy, and the United States should keep out of it.

Tytell writes that no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake. Pound had written over a thousand letters a year for the past decade, and had presented his ideas in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. According to Tytell, Pound's fear was an economic structure that depended on the armaments industry, where the profit motive would determine war and peace. He started reading George Santayana, and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. Cantos LII to LXXI were published in January 1940; he also translated Italy's Policy for Social Economics for Odon Por. In 1941 he tried twice to leave Italy with Dorothy. He was denied passage by plane on the first attempt, and later they were not allowed to board a diplomatic train.

He continued to write about the danger of Jewry wherever he could. He wrote in the Japan Times that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews.'" He told Mosley's newspaper that the English were a slave race governed by the Rothschilds since Waterloo. He also pushed to be allowed to broadcast over Rome Radio; he had done so occasionally, but the Italians were concerned that he might be a double agent and were reluctant to allow him regular airtime. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wrangling etc., to GET HOLD of their microphone." He began broadcasting regularly on 23 January 1941, and was paid around $17 for each ten-minute broadcast. He traveled to Rome one week a month to pre-record them, and they were broadcast every three days, with everything he wrote needing the Italian government's approval in advance. The politics apart, he needed the money. His father, Homer, had fallen and broken his hip and his pension payments had stopped...Homer died in February 1942...and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after. Olga and Mary were also considerations; Mary was by this time living with Olga in Sant 'Amgrogio.

Between January 1942 and his indictment for treason in July 1943, he made 125 broadcasts, criticizing the United States, Roosevelt, and Roosevelt's family, and rambling about his poetry, economics, and Chinese philosophy. Tytell writes that his voice had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar." In the broadcasts he blamed the Jews for the war, with frequent reference to "the kike" and "the kike's" relationship with the British government. On 27 April 1943 he said "60 kikes" had started the war inspired by the Talmud. On 15 March 1942 he said:

No Rothschild is English, no Streiker is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Kahn, Schiff, Sieff or Solomon was ever yet born Anglo-Saxon. And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your Empire. It is this filth that elects, selects, elects your politicians.

The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government, and he was indicted in absentia for treason on 26 July 1943.

Arrest for treason

A few weeks later he returned south via Milan to Olga and Dorothy. They had been living in Isabel's apartment, but it was small so they decided to move in with Olga at Sant' Ambrogio. Mary, then 19, was sent to Gais in Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she wrote, "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other." He was in Rome when the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. The situation was chaotic, and Pound borrowed a pair of hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell Mary about his wife and son. He traveled 450 miles north, spending a night in an air raid shelter in Bologna, and taking a train part of the way to Verona. She almost failed to recognize him he was so dirty and tired when he arrived. He told her everything about his other family; she later said she felt more pity for him than anger. He stayed with her long enough for his feet to heal. The village was occupied by Germans who considered Pound an enemy, and two soldiers were sent to arrest him, but one of the men, a local wood-carver, reportedly decided not to because he found Pound's head interesting.

He returned to Rapallo, and on 2 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was shot, armed partisans arrived at the house while Pound was there alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket, and was taken to their HQ in Chiavari, although he was released shortly afterwards. He and Olga then gave themselves up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna. It was decided that Pound should be transported to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by Frank L. Amprin, the FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to gather evidence following the 1943 indictment. Pound asked permission to send a cable to President Truman to offer his help in negotiating a "just peace" with Japan, given his knowledge of Japanese culture. He also asked to deliver a final radio broadcast from a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling," in which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script forwarded to Hoover.

On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, he was interviewed in Genoa by a reporter from the Philadelphia Record and Chicago Sun. He told the reporter Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint," and that Mussolini was an "imperfect character who lost his head." On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, used to house thousands of military prisoners. The temporary commander placed him in one of the camp's "death cells"...a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cages lit up all night by floodlights. He was left in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and no communication with his captors, except for the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth writes that he recorded it in Canto 80, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast' ou swum in a sea of air strip/through an aeon of nothingness,/when the raft broke and the waters went over me." The following week the medical staff moved him out of the cage; a psychiatric examination found premonitory symptoms of a mental breakdown, and he was transferred to his own officer's tent, where he was allowed reading material after another psychiatric evaluation. He began to write, and drafted what became known as The Pisan Cantos; the existence of a few sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto LXXXIV suggests he may have started it while in the cage.

St Elizabeths

He was transferred to the United States on 15 November, 1945. An escorting officer's impression 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." On 25 November he was arraigned in Washington D.C. on charges of treason. The 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 admitted to St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital, where in June 1946 Dorothy was declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison ward, Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole," a building without windows in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes, which allowed the psychiatrists to observe him while they tried to agree on a diagnosis. Visitors were allowed only for 15 minutes at a time, and the other patients wandered around outside the room, screaming and frothing at the mouth, according to T.S. Eliot.

Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell...whose efforts to have him declared insane are credited with having saved him from life imprisonment or even execution... requested his release at a bail hearing in January 1947. The hospital's superintendent, Winifred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years. In the 1980s the historian Stanley Kutler was given access to military intelligence and other government documents about Pound, including his hospital records. He wrote that the judgment of the psychiatrists at the time was that Pound had a narcissistic personality, but that they considered him sane. Kutler argued that Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was fascinated by him.

Tytell writes that there was a sense in which Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for and able to work. He was allowed to read and write, the visiting regulations were relaxed, and Dorothy was allowed to stay for several hours each day. He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important literary figures, calling his circle of visitors "Ezuversity." He began work on his translation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis and Electra, and continued work on The Cantos. It reached the point where he refused to discuss with friends any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, once in 1952 and again in 1955, and was similarly unable to convince him to be more assertive about his release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has ... bats in the belfry but it strikes me that he has fewer not more than before his incarceration."

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

His publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, had Cantos 74—84 ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave Pound an advance copy, but he had held them back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish them. Tytell writes that in June 1948 a group of Pound's friends...Eliot, Cummings, W.H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell...met Laughlin to discuss how to have him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men conceived a plan to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award that had just been announced by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family. Pound called it the "Bubble-Gum Prize," thinking he ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, which included several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted Pound for treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an anti-Semite because he was Jewish himself. Pound's response to the news of the award was, "No comment from the bughouse."

There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: "Perhaps no English poem since the time of Alexander Pope has stirred so much fuss as the Pisan Cantos," and quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in two articles for The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line." Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committtee, and as a result it was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.

Controversial friendships, release

Although Pound repudiated his anti-Semitism in public, Tytell writes that in private it continued. He often refused to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, would refer to people he disliked as Jews whether it was the case or not, and urged his visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a Russian forgery purporting to be a Jewish plan for world domination. He struck up a friendship during the 1950s with the writer Eustace Mullins, believed to be associated with the Aryan League of America, who wrote a biography of Pound, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (1961). Even more damaging was his friendship with a far-right activist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, John Kasper. Kasper had come to admire Pound during some literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the two became friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953 called "Make it New," reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; it specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry and translations were displayed in the window. Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform. Kasper was eventually jailed for the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student. Wilhelm writes that there were a lot of perfectly respectable people visiting Pound too, such as the classicist J.P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out, and it delayed his release from St Elizabeths.

Eliot's friends continued to try to secure his release; writers such as John Dos Passos, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and W.H. Auden became involved. MacLeish wrote to Hemingway in June 1957 asking him to write a letter on Pound's behalf. Hemingway believed Pound was unable to abstain from awkward political statements or from friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed the letters of support anyway, and pledged $1,500 to be given to Pound when he was released. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine: "I believe this would be a good year to release poets."

In 1957 several publications began campaigning for his release. Le Figaro published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths." The New Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed suit; The Nation argued that Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but that he had rights too. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose. The motion was heard on 18 April by the same judge who had committed him to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was free.

Pound arrived in Naples in July, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute by the waiting press. He and Dorothy went to live with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen...where he met his grandson, Walter, and his granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time...then returned to Rapallo, where Olga Rudge was waiting to join them. They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years younger than him, who was now ostensibly acting as his secretary, collecting poems for an anthology. The four women soon fell out, vying for control over him; Canto 113 alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness/3 pains of hell." Pound was in love with Marcella, seeing in her his last chance for love and youth. He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast/and to know beauty and death and despair/And to think that what has been shall be,/flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Marcella was seen off, sent back to America. Pound wrote to Hemingway: "Old man him tired."

By December 1959 he had fallen into a depression, insisting his work was worthless and The Cantos were botched. In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You...find me...in fragments." Hall wrote that he seemed in an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness, abulia, waste." He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life." Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in the summer of 1960 Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by the spring of 1961 he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went that summer to live with Olga, first in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. He attended a neo-Fascist May Day parade in 1962, but his health continued to decline, and he was in and out of hospitals. The next year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi, "I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered. ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning."

William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T. S. Eliot. Pound attended Eliot's funeral in London and traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow. He continued to travel throughout the 1960s and gave occasional poetry readings. Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in 1967. Pound told him The Cantos were a mess: "Stupidity and ignorance all the way through." He also told Ginsberg: "But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. All along that spoiled everything." He traveled to New York two years later for the opening of an exhibition that featured his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land, and received a standing ovation at Hamilton College when Laughlin received an honorary doctorate. Shortly before his death in 1972 it was proposed he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who explore hate and those who approve it. Two weeks before his 87th birthday he read for a gathering of friends at a café:

On his birthday he was too weak to leave his bedroom at his home in the Piazza San Marco, and the following night he was admitted to the city's Civil Hospital, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, aged 87, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinksy. Dorothy died in England the following year. Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound.

Themes and style

Opinion varies on the style of Pound's poetry. Critics agree that he was a strong lyricist, particularly in his early work. He drew on a variety of literature from medieval troubadour and ancient Chinese poetry to contemporary traditions. Nadel writes that 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. According to Nadel, he used Chinese ideograms to represent "the thing in pictures," and from Noh theater learned that plot could be replaced by a single image. In its purest form Imagism was a form of minimalism, but minimalism did not lend itself to the epic, and he therefore used the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.

The Cantos

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 and classical languages.William O'Connor writes that they are nearly impossible to read...filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, [and] obscenities of various sorts"...though hailed as a great achievement in 20th-century poetry. Eliot published an explanation of the work as early as 1917. Zukofsky published another in 1929, and Laughlin added an explanation to Cantos LIII—LXXI in 1940. A common criticism is the lack of coherence and form; Pound mixes satire, diaries, hymns, elegies, essays, and memoir, disregarding the boundaries of literary genres. Michael Ingham writes that they include everything but the kitchen sink, then add the kitchen sink. He compares the form to that of a fugue and sees the use of counterpoint as integral to the structure.

Legacy

Pound was responsible for advancing the careers of some the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, and Hemingway, he befriended and helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Hugh Witmeyer argues that the Imagist movement is the most important movement in 20th-century English language poetry because every prominent poet of the century applied imagist theories and practices.

Beyond his influence on the Imagist movement, Pound's legacy and reception are mixed. Hugh Kenner writes that there is no great contemporary writer less read than Pound; his antisemitism is central to an evaluation of his poetry, including whether it is read at all. The critic M.S. Rosenthal wrote that it was "if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant vitality were both at once made manifest" in Pound. The outrage after the treason charge was so deep that the imagined method of his execution...hanging or shooting...dominated the discussion. Arthur Miller considered him 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". The response went to so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was only in the 1980s that critics began a re-evaluation. Wendy Flory argues that Pound represented an ingrained but unacknowledged national antisemitism, and his vilification as "National Monster" mitigated national guilt, that his antisemitism served "as a convenient placeholder for all those whose antisemitism was not being confronted". Flory's view is that the best way to approach The Cantos is to separate the poetry from Pound's antisemitism, although she concedes that the approach is perceived as apologetic.

Michael Alexander writes that, 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.

Works published in his lifetime

• 1908 A Lume Spento, poems (Venice)
• 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems (London).
• 1909 Personae, poems (London)
• 1909 Exultations, poems (London)
• 1910 Provenca, poems (Boston)
• 1910 The Spirit of Romance, essays (London)
• 1911 Canzoni, poems (London)
• 1912 Ripostes, poems (London)
• 1912 The Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations, (London)
• 1915 Cathay, poems / translations
• 1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London)
• 1916 Certain noble plays of Japan: from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• 1916 "Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.
• 1916 "The Lake Isle", poem
• 1916 Lustra, poems.
• 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations
• 1918: Pavannes and Divisions, prose (New York)
• 1919 Quia Pauper Amavi, poems (London)
• 1919 The Fourth Canto, poems
• 1920 Umbra, poems and translations (London)
• 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, poems (London)
• 1921 Poems, 1918—1921, poems (New York)
• 1922 The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations
• 1923 Indiscretions, essays
• 1923 Le Testament de Villon
• 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays (Paris)
• 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems (Paris)
• 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York)
• 1927 Exile, poems
• 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17—27, poems
• 1928 Selected Poems, edited by T. S. Eliot (London)
• 1928 Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation
• 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems (New York)
• 1930 Imaginary Letters, essays
• 1931 How to Read, essays
• 1933 ABC of Economics, essays
• 1933 Cavalcanti, three-act opera
• 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems (New York)
• 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems (London)
• 1934 ABC of Reading, essays
• 1935 Make It New, essays
• 1936 Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound
• 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems (London)
• 1937 Polite Essays, essays
• 1937 Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation
• 1938 Guide to Kulchur, essays
• 1939 What Is Money For?, essays
• 1940 Cantos LII-LXXI, poems
• 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A., prose
• 1947 Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest, translation
• 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems (New York)
• 1950 Seventy Cantos, poems
• 1951 Confucian analects, translator
• 1953: The Translations of Ezra Pound, translations (London)
• 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85—95 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
• 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound, translation (London)
• 1959 Thrones: 96—109 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
• 1960 IMPACT; Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization (Chicago)
• 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems