Navigation: <Home> <Contact>
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Born on October 30, 1885, in the rugged mining town of Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Weston Loomis Pound would grow into one of the most influential—and polarizing—figures of 20th-century literature. His life was a tapestry of artistic brilliance, fierce loyalties, and troubling ideologies, woven with threads of innovation and infamy .
Pound’s family soon left Idaho for the East Coast, settling in Pennsylvania, where his father worked at the Philadelphia Mint. Even as a child, Ezra stood out—precocious, opinionated, and brimming with creative energy. He published his first poem at 11, a cheeky limerick about politician William Jennings Bryan, hinting at the sharp wit that would define his later work . Read More
After stints at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College, where he studied languages and literature, Pound’s academic career fizzled. He clashed with professors, abandoned his PhD, and took a short-lived teaching job at Wabash College in Indiana. Fired for hosting a woman in his room (he claimed he slept on the floor), he packed his bags for Europe in 1908, declaring America stifling. “I am homesick after mine own kind,” he wrote, yearning for a world that matched his intellectual fervor .
In Venice, Pound self-published his first poetry collection, A Lume Spento (“With Tapers Quenched”), and then headed to London, where he became a whirlwind of literary activity. He befriended W.B. Yeats, championed James Joyce’s Ulysses, and edited T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, famously cutting it down to its iconic form. Hemingway later quipped that ignoring Pound’s influence was “like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold” .
Pound co-founded Imagism, a movement demanding precision and economy in poetry. His 14-word poem “In a Station of the Metro” became a manifesto for the style. Yet, ever restless, he soon moved on to Vorticism, embracing avant-garde art and editing the radical journal BLAST.
By the 1920s, Pound’s focus shifted from poetry to politics. Settling in Italy, he became obsessed with economic theories, blaming “usury” and “international finance” for society’s ills. He admired Mussolini, calling him a modern-day Renaissance ruler, and during WWII, he made hundreds of radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy, spewing antisemitic vitriol and urging U.S. soldiers to desert .
Captured in 1945 by partisans, Pound was imprisoned in a U.S. Army detention camp near Pisa, where he drafted sections of The Pisan Cantos. These fragments, blending lyrical beauty with defiance, won the Bollingen Prize in 1949—a decision that sparked outrage given his wartime actions .
Pound died in Venice in 1972, leaving behind The Cantos, an unfinished, chaotic epic hailed as a modernist masterpiece and criticized as a labyrinth of elitism and bigotry. His legacy is a paradox: a poet who reshaped literature but was undone by his own demons. As critic Irving Howe put it, he was “beyond the bounds of our intellectual life“—yet his shadow looms large over the art he loved and the history he marred .
Ezra Pound was a man of contradictions—a visionary who democratized poetry yet embraced tyranny, a mentor to giants yet a prisoner of his own hatreds. His life reminds us that genius and flaw often share the same page, and that art, no matter how sublime, is never free from the weight of its creator’s choices.
Difficult words from with their meanings:
- Infamy – The state of being well known for a bad quality or deed.
- Precocious – Having developed certain abilities or inclinations at an earlier age than usual.
- Limerick – A humorous, often bawdy, poem with a specific rhyme scheme (AABBA).
- Whirlwind – A situation or series of events where many things happen quickly and unpredictably.
- Manifesto – A public declaration of intentions, beliefs, or policies.
- Avant-garde – New and experimental ideas, especially in the arts.
- Vorticism – An early 20th-century artistic movement emphasizing modern life through abstract forms.
- Usury – The illegal or unethical practice of charging excessive interest on loans.
- Desert – In this context, it means to abandon one’s duty or cause, often with negative consequences.
- Contradiction – A situation in which opposing elements coexist, creating inconsistency.
- Bigotry – Intolerance toward those who have different opinions or beliefs.
- Labyrinth – A complex and confusing network, often used metaphorically for intricate ideas.
- Marred – Damaged or spoiled, reducing quality or integrity.
- Reshaped – To change the structure or form of something significantly.
- Elitism – The belief that a select group of people deserve special status or privileges.
One Response
[…] he gambled radically and opened a venture that would alter literary history. Joining forces with Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats in London circles, he found his artistic voice and finally published A […]