Biography of Ezra Pound

            Ezra Pound is considered one of the most prominent literary figures in the advancement of modern poetry. More than just an artist, he actively expressed his opinions – politically and artistically – and rubbed shoulders with some of the most influential poets in the early modernist movement, of which he was a large component. He supported fascism and lived in Italy from 1924 through the 40s where he wrote anti-American publications. This and his support of Mussolini and Hitler led to his arrest by the US for treason, and during his detention in a steel cage he experienced a mental breakdown. His most well-known works are Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos. As signature of modernist poets, Pound’s poems were commonly filled with allusion, phrases from other languages, and abrupt changes from one thought to another.

            Ezra was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory as an only child in 1885. With his father Homer and his mother Isabel they moved to Pennsylvania when Ezra was 18 months old. Ezra attended a series of “dame schools” and also went to military school for 2 years, although he was keen to become a poet from a young age. His first poem was a limerick published in 1896 about William Jennings Bryan, and in 1901 he took up his admission to the University of Pennsylvania in the College of Liberal Arts. Partly due to poor grades, he was shifted to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he studied the Provençal dialect and Old English and graduated in 1905 with a degree in philosophy. Later, he studied Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained a masters degree in 1906.
            He took a teaching position in 1907 at Wabash College, but then was dismissed because the school was too conservative and Pound was too rebellious, so the next year he went to Europe. He arrived in Gibraltar with $80 and made money being a guide to American tourists. He began writing, and self-published his first book of poetry, A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent), and sold 100 copies at 6 cents each. He moved to London and entered the poetry scene, which was mainly characterized by Victorian poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson, and he met WB Yeats and William Carlos Williams. In London Pound showed his eccentric side, wearing 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 according to Ford Madox Ford.

            Things began looking up, as in 1909 Personae was published and had great commercial success, and in 1914 Ezra married Dorothy Shakespeare. He visited the US for eight months in 1910 and then went back to Europe, not to return to the US for another 30 years. While living in London, Pound made consistent contributions to literary magazines like Poetry and spent time with other poets and literary figures of the time. Pound wrote “In a Station of the Metro,” inspired by seeing beautiful faces in a metro station in Paris, Ripostes, helped T.S. Eliot publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” helped James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man gain attention and be published, wrote “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, which was about the struggle of a poet whose life had become meaningless and was seen as autobiographical, and contributed to the Imagism movement, which was characterized by writing musical not methodical prose and only including descriptions as necessary to the subject of the poem. Pound also began writing “The Cantos” in 1915 and had the first section of it published in 1925. It was described by Pound as a “poem including history,” including subjects like economics and the horrors of World War I.

            The Pounds moved to Paris, where Ezra edited Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” mixed with people of the Dada and Surrealist movement, and became friends with Earnest Hemmingway even though he was 14 years younger than Pound. They were unhappy in Paris and moved to a small town in Italy.

Pound continued working on “The Cantos” and living in Italy. As Benito Mussolini came to power, Pound expressed his support for him and condemned the US, recording hundreds of broadcasts for Rome Radio. Pound was then arrested for treason and brought back to the US where he was going to stand trial, but during the process he was declared insane and placed inside a mental hospital. Pound continued to work, though, and published the “Pisan Cantos” which was praised as “among the masterpieces of the century” by the New York Times. Robert Frost helped Pound get out of St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, and Pound then returned to Italy and published further sections of “The Cantos.” During his lifetime he published 70 books of his own writing, helped about 70 others become published, and authored more than 1,500 articles. Ezra Pound died in 1972 in Venice at the age of 87.