Ezra Pound

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory. He would go on to become one of the defining voices in modernist literature, a tireless champion of writers like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. But he would also record hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for fascist Italy during World War II, praise the Holocaust, and spend over twelve years locked inside a psychiatric hospital rather than face a treason trial. How does a poet who helped launch one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century end up urging American soldiers to surrender to the enemy? And what do we make of his legacy when his genius and his hatred ran so close together? Those questions run through everything that followed his birth in that Idaho house.

• 2. Roots and Restlessness

  ›

  Homer Loomis Pound had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the United States General Land Office. He had the job because Ezra's paternal grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican congressman and the 10th lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, had secured it for him. The family traced its American roots to the 17th century: on his father's side, John Pound, a Quaker, had arrived from England around 1650. On his mother's side, William Wadsworth, a Puritan, had sailed to Boston on the Lion in 1632.

  Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took her 18-month-old son to New York in 1887. The family eventually settled in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, buying a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in 1893. The boy known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray") attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894. His first publication appeared on the 7th of November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a limerick about William Jennings Bryan signed "E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years".

  At 15 Pound entered the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, claiming years later that his aim was simply to avoid drill at his military academy. His grades were largely poor. He transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, studied the Provençal dialect of the Occitan language, read Dante and Beowulf and The Seafarer, and graduated in 1905 with a PhB. Returning to Penn for a master's degree in Romance languages, he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle, later known as H.D., hand-binding 25 of his poems for her in a volume he called Hilda's Book.

  After a fellowship funded a two-year research trip to Europe, his academic career collapsed in the spring of 1907 when the department head, Felix Schelling, told him he was wasting everyone's time. From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College, a Presbyterian institution with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which he called "the sixth circle of hell." He was dismissed after a few months. His landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room, and the college asked him to leave in January 1908.

• 3. London and the Making of Imagism

  ›

  Pound arrived in Gibraltar on the 23rd of March 1908, earning $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain. By the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge, where he self-published his first collection of 44 poems, A Lume Spento, 150 copies printed in July 1908. He considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal before going ahead.

  In August he moved to London carrying 60 of those copies, and the city took to him quickly. Punch magazine on the 23rd of June 1909 called "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning." Ford Madox Ford described him approaching with "the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent," wearing trousers of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard, and a single large blue earring.

  At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and was later introduced to her daughter Dorothy, who became his wife in 1914. Through the Shakespears he met W. B. Yeats. Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, invited Pound to Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, to serve as his secretary during the first of three winters they spent there together.

  In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. That same month Stephen Swift and Co. published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems that marks his shift toward minimalist language. Ripostes contains the first mention of Les Imagistes. The founding moment of Imagism itself came in the British Museum tearoom, when Pound edited one of Hilda Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath. The movement rested on three principles agreed in the spring or early summer of 1912: direct treatment of the subject whether subjective or objective, absolute economy of language so that every word contributed, and rhythm composed in the sequence of a musical phrase rather than a metronome.

  Poetry published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. He called for poets to "go in fear of abstractions" and wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges." His own poem "In a Station of the Metro," published in Poetry in April 1913, grew out of a day on the Paris Metro when he saw a series of beautiful faces and could get nothing from the experience "but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.

• 4. Champion of a Generation

  ›

  On the 22nd of September 1914 T. S. Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford, to have Pound read the unpublished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe eight days later calling it "the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American." Monroe had reservations but published it in June 1915.

  Joyce entered the picture at the suggestion of Yeats. Pound encouraged Joyce in December 1913 to submit his work, received a chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and wrote back that it was "damn fine stuff." Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist, which serialized it from the 2nd of February 1914. On the basis of that serialization, the publisher that had previously rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker."

  Pound was also responsible for the 1915 publication of Cathay, 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry translated into English from the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, whose widow had given Pound her husband's notebooks in 1913. Two months before Gaudier-Brzeska died in the trenches in June 1915, the sculptor wrote to Pound to say he kept Cathay in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows."

  When Eliot sent the manuscript of The Waste Land to Pound in 1922, Pound edited it with comments like "make up yr. mind" and reduced it by about half. Eliot wrote in 1946 that he wished the manuscript's "blue pencilling" to be preserved "as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius," and dedicated the published poem "For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro" (the better craftsman), from Dante's Purgatorio. In Paris, Hemingway, then 22, moved into the Pounds' social orbit in December 1921, assumed the status of pupil, asked Pound to edit his short stories, and tried in return to teach Pound to box. By 1932 Hemingway wrote that for poets of their generation, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."

• 5. The Cantos and a Life's Work

  ›

  In September 1915 Pound described a poem he was planning as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore." The Cantos, running from "Canto I" to "Canto CXVI" (c. 1917-1962), grew to 800 pages, roughly twice the length of Paradise Lost and 50 times longer than The Waste Land.

  The first three cantos appeared in Poetry in June, July, and August 1917, but in 1922 Pound abandoned most of that work and began again. In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927 he described the poem as something like the medley of voices you hear when you turn a radio dial, and "rather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue." Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell argued it was a great religious poem tracing humanity's journey from hell to paradise; the poet Allen Tate countered in 1949 that it was "about nothing at all... a voice but no subject."

  Critics fastened on its lack of form. In the final complete canto, "Canto CXVI," first published in The Paris Review in 1962, Pound himself acknowledged he could not "make it cohere," then added a few lines later, referring to the universe: "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere." The Times obituary called the whole work not a great poem, because of that structural failure, but a great improvisation: "the exasperating form permits the occasional, and in the early Cantos and in The Pisan Cantos not so occasional, irruption of passages of great poetry, hot and burning lava breaking through the cracks in piles of boring scree."

  Pound published Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in June 1920 before leaving London for Paris and eventually Italy. Consisting of 18 short parts, the poem describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless, and contains the first appearance in his work of the word usury. The critic F. R. Leavis called it in 1932 "great poetry, at once traditional and original," and said Pound's reputation as a poet rested on it securely.

• 6. From Economics to Fascism

  ›

  Pound's antisemitism can be traced to at least 1910, when he wrote in Patria Mia that "The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions." In the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane, attending New Age editorial meetings from the 30th of November 1911 to the 13th of January 1921, he encountered C. H. Douglas, a British engineer developing the economic theory of social credit, which Pound found compelling. Douglas reportedly believed Jews needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the "dominating race," and the New Age itself published antisemitic material.

  Pound moved to the seaside town of Rapallo in northern Italy in October 1924. Through the 1930s he promoted social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley, and turned out more than 1,000 letters a year. From 1932 he contributed 180 articles to The New English Weekly and 60 to Il Mare, a Rapallo newspaper.

  He met Benito Mussolini on the 30th of January 1933 at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the same day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. When Pound handed Mussolini a copy of A Draft of XXX Cantos, Mussolini reportedly called a highlighted passage "entertaining" (divertente). Pound wrote to C. H. Douglas that he had "never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss." He recorded the encounter in "Canto XLI" and immediately began writing Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), telling Italy's Royal Finance Office in 1942 that he had written it for propaganda purposes in Italy's interests.

  Pound sailed for New York in April 1939 on the SS Rex in a first-class suite, believing he could stop America's involvement in the coming war. He lobbied senators, had lunch with the Polish ambassador to warn him not to trust Churchill, attended a session of Congress, and received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College in July. He interrupted a speech at the ceremony by radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, who had declared that dictatorships would die while democracies survived, to the point where the college president reportedly had to intervene. Pound sailed back to Italy a few days later on the SS Conte di Savoia.

• 7. Broadcasts, Arrest, and the Asylum

  ›

  Between the 23rd of January 1941 and the 28th of March 1945, Pound recorded or composed hundreds of broadcasts for Italian radio, mostly for EIAR (Radio Rome) and later for a station in the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state of Nazi Germany. Styling himself "Dr Ezra Pound" (his only doctorate was the honorary one from Hamilton College), he attacked the United States, Roosevelt and his family, Churchill, and Jewish people. He praised Hitler, recommended eugenics to "conserve the best of the race," and praised the Holocaust. The Pound archives at Yale contain receipts showing 195 payments from the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture between April 1941 and January 1944. Over those 33 months he received 250,000 lire, then equivalent to $12,500.

  On the 26th of July 1943, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia indicted Pound in absentia for treason. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were shot by Italian partisans on the 28th of April 1945 and their bodies displayed hanging upside down in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. Pound recorded the scene in "Canto LXXIV." On the 3rd of May, armed partisans arrived at Olga Rudge's home to find Pound alone. He picked up the Confucian text Four Books and a Chinese-English dictionary and was taken to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where FBI agent Frank L. Amprin interrogated him.

  The army held him at a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. While in custody he continued working on The Cantos; the resulting material was published by New Directions in 1948 as The Pisan Cantos. The American Library of Congress awarded Pound the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, generating enormous controversy.

  Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. for over twelve years. After a campaign by fellow writers, he was released in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called the United States "an insane asylum." He remained in Italy until his death on the 1st of November 1972.