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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language, derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. His best-known poems include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his epic poem The Cantos, which he began in 1915 and published between 1925 and 1964.

Living in London and Paris in the early years of the 20th century, Pound opened a dialogue between American and British writers, and helped to promote the work of contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "he defends when they are attacked, and gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them .... He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide." He contributed to Wyndham Lewis's magazine BLAST, became London editor of The Little Review, and wrote for The New Age and Poetry. He was also known for his translations, which included translating Ernest Fenollosa's work from Japanese, and the work of medieval writers such as Guido Cavalcanti.

After World War I he became interested in economics, believing that only economic reform could prevent another war, and in 1924 moved to Italy, where he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism and met Mussolini himself in 1933. He argued that usury and the Bank of England were behind the Great Depression, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. Between 1935 and the end of the war he made hundreds of rambling radio broadcasts from Rome to America, some of which the Italian government paid him for, criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jews, and the global economy, and in 1939 met senators and congressmen in Washington, D.C., thinking he could stop the United States from entering World War II. His broadcasts were monitored by the U.S. government, and he was arrested for treason in 1945, spending months in a detention center in Pisa, Italy—including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage lit by floodlights at night, during which he said he had a mental breakdown, or "burst a mainspring," as he put it.

Transferred to the United States in November 1945, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial and was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years, despite protests from fellow writers. While in custody in Italy he had begun work on The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, an honor that triggered enormous controversy because of his antisemitism. After his release from St. Elizabeths in 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued to work on The Cantos, and died there in 1972. In 1971 Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner tried with his book The Pound Era to resurrect his reputation, arguing for him as the greatest of the modernist poets, but Pound's political views and the treason charge ensure that his life and work remain controversial.

Biography

Early life

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston, descended from a family about which he said he could write the whole social history of the United States. His grandfather Thaddeus C. Pound was a retired Republican Congressmen, with mine-holdings in the Wood River Valley, and his mother descended from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a family with political influence.

Pound's father was in charge of the United States Land Office in Idaho, but the area's high altitude made his wife sick, forcing them to leave in 1887, traveling through the Great Blizzard of that year. They lived for a year with Isabel's uncle, Ezra Brown Weston, 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, where he worked until his retirement. The family lived at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and Ezra was enrolled in the local Chelton Hills School. In 1895 he was sent to the Wyncote Public School, and in 1897 transferred to the Cheltenham Military Academy, where the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and were taught Latin, as well as military drills and rifle shooting; he wrote of it, "I could stand everything but the drilling." He also attended the Calvary Presbyterian Church, where he professed his faith in Christianity.

University and teaching (1901–07)

His first trip to Europe was in 1898 with his mother and Aunt Frank, visiting England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 at the age of 15, at first intending to study for a Bachelor of Science degree, but he became interested in Romance languages. There he met and established life-long friendships with the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, then a medical student, and Hilda Doolittle—the daughter of the university's professor of astronomy—who became a poet known, thanks to Pound, as H.D., and who became involved with Pound in developing the Imagism movement in London.

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on his second tour of Europe 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. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1905, and in the fall of that year enrolled again at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert, and obtained his MA in the spring of 1906. In June that year he was awarded a Harrison fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania for more graduate studies, with a travel award of $500. He used the money to visit Europe, spending a week in the British Museum Reading Room in London, and another week in the Royal Library in Madrid studying Lope de Vega's plays, then visited Bordeaux, Paris, and London. His first published essay, Raphalite Latin, appeared in Book News in September 1906, in which he committed himself to internationalism, arguing that provincialism was the enemy. On his return to the university he read Chanson de Roland, Boccaccio's Decameron and the Provençal poets, studying under Felix Shelling, whom he reportedly annoyed with silly remarks, and his fellowship was not renewed at the end of the year.

He briefly taught French and Spanish in the spring of 1907 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."

London, New York, Paris (1908–11)

Around this time his romantic interest in Hilda Doolittle was renewed, while at the same time he was seeing two other women, Viola Baxter and Mary Moore, later dedicating the Personae to the latter. In the summer of 1907 he asked both Mary and Hilda to marry him. The first declined, and the latter accepted, but her father refused permission. He returned to Europe in April 1908, financed by his father, visiting Gilbraltar, Tangiers, Cadiz, and Seville. He stayed in Venice for awhile, where in July that year he self-published his first collection of short poems—the 72-page A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent)—before moving to London with the intention of meeting Yeats, the greatest living poet in Pound's view, to whom he had sent a copy of the book and who said he found it charming. "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy," he told William Carlos Williams.

He arrived in London in August 1908 and rented a room from Ann Withey, whom he had met in 1906, at 8 Duchess Street near Portland Place in the city's West End. When he found it too expensive he moved briefly to Islington in the north, then when his family sent more money he move back to the West End, renting a room at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. 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 he managed to acquire a position lecturing at the London Polytechnic Institute on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings studying in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street, presenting himself as an aesthete, serious about his art while affecting a distinct flamboyance—he dressed in brightly colored capes, wore an earring and hand-painted silk shirts.

At a literary salon in February 1909, he befriended Olivia Shakespear and her daughter Dorothy, and a month later Olivia introduced him to Yeats. By June he had met the writer T. E. Hulme, and had written and published Personae to good reviews. He was hired to present a second series of lectures at the Polytechnic, the lecture notes forming the basis for The Spirit of Romance (1910). Although he was earning very little he decided to stay in London. In September he took new rooms at Church Walk off Kensington High Street, and in November met D. H. Lawrence at a salon, and the two became friends.

In 1910 he returned to the United States for a year. His arrival in New York coincided with the publication of The Spirit of Romance, of which a Boston critic wrote, "Pound is a man of clear insight ... But to find himself, he must first get lost." He convinced H.D. to join him in New York but, unable to find work, she returned to Philadelphia promising to visit in Europe if he were to return there. Walter Morse Rummel, whom he had met the previous spring in Paris, arrived for a visit, and invited him to Paris for a collaboration on setting troubadour poetry to music. He was disappointed in New York, believed commercialism drowned art. His essays about America were written during this period, and became the book Patria Mia, which remained unpublished until 1950.

On 22 February 1911 Pound sailed from New York, and did not return to the United States for 28 years. He first moved to Paris, where he finished the Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel translations begun in New York, worked on Canzoni, and the collaboration with Rummel. Through the project with Rummel he developed an interest in music, and began to concentrate on the role of rhythm and pitch in poetry. He spent considerable time with American heiress Margaret Cravens, whom he had met in Paris a year earlier. It was during this period that she gave him a large sum of money to fund his writing career, perhaps as much as two-thirds of her income, which he kept secret from his and Dorothy's family. Cravens committed suicide a year later, after hearing the news of Pound's unofficial engagement to Dorothy and Rummel's engagement to her former piano teacher; she listened to a tune written by Pound and Rummel as she took her life.

Imagism, and Ripostes (1911–13)

After returning to London in August 1911, Pound began work on Ripostes, hoping for publication in February. Hulme introduced him to A. R. Orage, the editor of the socialist journal The New Age, who hired him to write a weekly column. H.D. arrived in London and decided to stay. Pound introduced her to his friends; she found herself attracted to the poet Richard Aldington, who shared her interest in Hellenism. Pound, Aldington, and H.D. worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room, and it was in the tearoom one afternoon that they decided to begin a "movement" in poetry that they called "Imagisme". As early as January 1912 Pound referred to H.D. and Aldington as des imagistes. Imagisme, as they defined it, must adhere to three tenets:

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

A later definition appeared in the October 1912 publication of Ripostes. Imagisme, Pound wrote, is "concerned solely with language and presentation". Pound had been 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 work for an anthology of Imagisme poets titled Des Imagistes, published in February 1914. According to biographer A. David Moody, the Imagisme movement, which Pound said "began certainly at Church Walk with H.D., Richard and myself", peaked in 1913 when all three had rooms at Church Walk in Kensington.

When in 1913 Yeats won the annual Poetry prize for the poem of his Pound had submitted, he gave Pound the money. Pound used it to buy a typewriter and commission a sculpture from his new friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Also in 1913 Pound spent the first of three winters at Stone Cottage with Yeats, acting as his secretary. Pound learned from Yeats that a multicultural perspective could be found in folklore and, according to Pound scholar George Bornstein, the two pushed one another towards modernism. Of greater 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 that winter. Eventually Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.

BLAST, and marriage (1914)

Pound contributed to the Rebel Art Center and Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine BLAST, the first issue of which appeared in June 1914. With its bright cover art and bold lettering, the magazine received a mixed reception—some critics hated it, while others praised the avant-garde style. Because the magazine was devoted to literature and art, Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagism to art, naming it Vorticism, which he defined in an essay published a few months later. Vorticism, he wrote, was "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."

The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the imagists. At the dinner she was embarrassed by Gaudier-Brzeska when he mentioned her weight; when she later hosted her own dinner she was further embarrassed by Pound. Lowell nonetheless decided to publish an anthology of imagist poets, and requested work from H.D., Yeats, Lawrence and others, but refused to include Pound. When critics began to describe Lowell as the "foremost member of Imagists" following the publication of her anthology, Pound was deeply resentful. He began to refer to Imagism as "Amygism", and was further disgusted when his submission to Poetry for T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was rejected as too cosmopolitan. In July 1914 he declared Imagisme dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually Anglicized it.

On 20 April 1914 Pound married Dorothy despite opposition from her father, who was concerned about Pound's idiosyncracies and lack of financial stability. Her father relented when the couple agreed to marry in church, and her parents made them a gift of two early circus drawings by Pablo Picasso. They moved into an apartment at 5 Holland Place, with H.D. and the recently married Aldington as neighbors. Although the couple planned to honeymoon in Spain that September, the outbreak of World War I forced them to postpone. They instead lived with Yeats at Stone Cottage for the winter, where Pound worked on proofs for the second issue of BLAST. Of Dorothy, Yeats wrote, "she looks as if her face were made out of Dresden china. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is hard to believe she is real; yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures."

World War I (1914–18)

In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a small volume of translated Chinese poems, collected by Fenollosa. The work contains "The River Merchant's Wife" and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road, and received good reviews. He increasingly saw himself as an outsider, and added a defense of his work 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".

He returned to realism during the war years and was determined to promote Lewis, Eliot and Joyce. After Lewis was sent to the front, Pound concentrated on supporting Joyce and Eliot. He helped find publishers for Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Eliot's "Prufrock". New York attorney and art collector John Quinn became a patron and even paid for Joyce's glaucoma operation in 1917.

Pound was deeply affected by the war and devastated when Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches. He was upset when criticized for bad taste for his July 1915 article in BLAST on Rupert Brooke, who had recently been killed in France. In April 1916 he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, with letters, illustrations and photographs of Gaudier-Brzeska's work, establishing Gaudier-Brzeska'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. During this period, Pound worked on what he began to call his long poem. According to Pound scholar Daniel Albright the term "canto" was an evocation of Dante, suggesting "that the poem is a Divine Comedy for the modernist age". Nevertheless Pound found inspiration in Robert Browning for the earliest section, titled "Three Cantos", published in Poetry in 1917.

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 Egoist, often writing two to three articles each week. 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 Daniel Arnaut. The volume of writing disillusioned and 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 for perceived vulgarity, 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 in November 1918, his response was "Thank God the war is mostly over".

Disillusionment with England (1919–20)

World War I 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 suspected the Vorticist movement was finished and he 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 in "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in Poetry. "Homage" is considered an example of modernism rather than a strict translation; as Moody describes it the work is "the refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". When Harriet Monroe, the 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 he became increasingly interested in. He continued to write cantos and quickly finished three more. By the winter of 1920 he had enough material to collect into a single volume, titled Poems 1918–1921.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Paris (1920–21)

The publication in 1920 of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, about a poet whose life, like Pound's, has become sterile and meaningless, marked a farewell to Pound's London career. He was disgusted by the lives lost during the war, and was unable to 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 James 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 moved to Paris too. A. R. Orage wrote in the January 1921 issue of The New Age: "Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England ... however, Mr. Pound ... has made more 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."

They settled in Paris in January 1921. He 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. Pound became friendly 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 by chance at Sylvia Beach's bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company. Hemingway described Pound as "tall, with a scratchy red beard, fine eyes and strange haircuts". He continued to write for magazines although his contributions dropped significantly; except for a "Paris Letter" he submitted to Dial, he published little else. He built furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Shakespeare and Company. In 1921, Poems 1918–1921 were published by Boni and Liveright. When Eliot sent a "welter of manuscripts" which included "The Waste Land", Pound advocated cuts. During time spent together in Paris in the spring of 1922, Pound blue-inked Eliot's work 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). When Joyce finally had Ulysses published in 1922, Pound rejoiced and wrote reviews for both "The Waste Land" and Ulysses.

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, " 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 (1922–24)

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. They were introduced for the first time at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 rue Jacob, near the boulevard Saint Germain. Glamorously dressed in a red jacket embroidered with gold dragons, 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 a 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.

According to Hugh Kenner, books were inexpensive to publish in Paris at the time. The custom printing house Three Mountains Press printed and published works by Hemingway, Williams and Pound; by 1925 a folio edition of Pound's A Draft of XVI Cantos was printed and released. When in 1925 the early form of The Cantos appeared, they completed the triad of modernist masterpieces begun by The Waste Land and Ulysses.

Italy and the birth of the children (1925–30)

In 1924 Pound left Paris for Italy to recuperate after appendicitis. He and Dorothy stayed briefly in Rapallo, then moved on to Sicily before returning permanently to Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he established two homes, one with Dorothy and another with Olga Rudge. Olga had wanted to have his child, and after initial protests he agreed, though for a long time the child's existence was kept secret from Dorothy. She gave birth to their daughter Mary on 9 July 1925 in the Italian Tyrol; Pound had snuck away from Rapallo to be with her. Mary was born prematurely, and once Olga was certain she would live she handed her over to be raised by Frau Marcher, a woman Olga had met in hospital whose own child died. Marcher and her husband agreed to foster Mary for 200 lire a month. According to Carpenter, Mary's accounts of her upbringing are conflicted: she wrote fondly of the couple in her biography, but elsewhere hinted at a harsh upbringing.

Dorothy was apart from Pound for much of that and the following year, and in March 1926 she returned pregnant from a three-month visit to Egypt. A few months later 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. On 10 September 1926 Hemingway drove her to the American Hospital of Paris, where her son 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 moved to England with the baby, where he was placed in care with the retired superintendent of a nanny school in Felpham, Sussex. Dorothy returned to Rapallo in September 1927; the boy stayed in England until his adolescence.

By 1928 Yeats and Richard Aldington were living in Rapallo too. That summer Homer and Isabel visited Pound whom they had not seen since 1914. Homer had retired from the Mint and by September they decided to retire in Rapallo. A few months later they moved into a small house, Villa Raggio, situated on a hill above the town. Pound told his father about Mary's existence, but Carpenter writes that Isabel either was not told or chose not to know about her son's daughter.

In 1925 the literary magazine This Quarter dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. Pound published Cantos 17, 18, and 19 in the winter editions. Shortly after this he stopped writing for about 18 months, although prepared his Collected Poems 1926 for publication. In 1927 his hope for launching this own literary magazine was realized when The Exile went to press in March. According to biographer 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 his own 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 religious intolerance were clearly showing roots". Only four issues of the magazine were published. Pound 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. A limited edition (200 copies) of Pound's Cantos XXX was published in 1930. Then aged 44, he had devoted 15 years to the work.

Turn to fascism (1930s)

During the 1930s Pound came to believe that the solution to the economic crisis of the Great Depression was social credit. He believed fascism was the solution, 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 him against it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met with Mussolini, presenting him a copy of Cantos XXX and reading a passage that Mussolini called divertente ("entertaining"). As a result of the meeting, Pound began work on two books, The ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Hemingway tried to warn Pound away from Mussolini, writing in a letter that he did not think much of him.

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, ill and unable to travel, 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 at the funeral. Back in Italy Pound joined Olga and Mary in Rome, then sailed for New York, believing he could stop America from involvement in World War II. He traveled to Washington, D.C. where he met cabinet members, senators, and congressmen, and offered his services to Senator William Borah to work for the country in an official capacity, though Stock writes that he was depressed by his lack of success. He left Washington to receive an honorary Ph.D from Hamilton College, and a week later returned to Italy.

World War II (1939–45)

Following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Pound 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. By 1939 his writing had become increasingly antisemitic. A year later he translated Italy's Policy for Social Economics for Odon Por, which he held up as a good example of the implementation of social credit in Italy. Because he felt his efforts to thwart the war and his economic philosophy were being ignored, he approached Rome Radio with the idea of a weekly radio broadcast. He had been asked by the Italian government In 1935 to make a series of radio speeches on "the economic triumph of fascism", but he had refused then and again in 1936, saying "I don't care a hoot about talking over the radio". But by 1940 Stock writes that Pound was living in isolation; he believes Pound may have felt alone intellectually, obsessed with his ideas and isolated from both his homeland and England. For the first time in decades he faced the need to earn a living; Dorothy's income from England ended, his father's pension checks arrived late or not at all, and his royalty checks were stopped because of the war.

In September 1940 he considered leaving Italy but, as he wrote to a friend, "thought of going to U.S. to annoy 'em, but Clipper won't take anything except mails until Dec. 15. So am back here at the old stand." 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. The prospect of leaving with his mother, his father (disabled from a recent hip fracture), his wife, his lover and his daughter, who did not have an American passport, was becoming increasingly difficult. In February 1942, his father died.

From 1941 to 1943 Pound made over 100 shortwave radio broadcasts from Rome to America, criticizing the United States, Roosevelt, and Jews, and rambling about his poetry, economics, and Chinese philosophy, to the point where the Italians suspected him of being an American agent. He pre-recorded the 10- to 15-minute broadcasts, receiving around $18 for each one that aired, along with a free rail pass from Rapallo to Rome. The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government—the transcripts now stored in the Library of Congress—and he was indicted in absentia for treason in 1943. Pound scholar Wendy Flory believes from that as early as 1935 he was mentally ill, and that the broadcasts were "disorganized rantings reflecting his confused and delusional attitude". George Orwell took issue with that view in May 1949, arguing that Pound was a follower of Mussolini as early as the 1920s, contributed to Oswald Mosley's British Union Quarterly, and accepted a professorship from the Italian government before the war began.

Pound was in Rome when the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. According to Stock the situation in Rome was chaotic, and Pound inexplicably borrowed a pair of boots and a knapsack and left the city. Worried about Mary's safety he walked 450 miles north to German-occupied Tyrol to find her. According to one account he tried to board a train but it was over-crowded; according to a second account he was on the train but left when he was questioned by German military authorities. When he found Mary, he finally admitted that he had a wife and son. He stayed with her long enough for his feet to heal, but the village was occupied by Germans who considered Pound an enemy, and two soldiers were sent to arrest him; one of the men, a local wood-carver, reportedly decided not to arrest him because he found Pound's head fascinating.

A few weeks later he returned south via Milan to Olga and Dorothy. In 1944 he and Dorothy were evacuated from their Rapallo sea-front home by the Germans, who erected barricades along the waterfront. He intended for Dorothy to live with his mother Isabel in Rapallo, while he joined Olga in Sant'Ambrogio. Instead Dorothy chose to live with Pound and Olga, the latter taking a job in a Roman Catholic Ursuline school to earn money.

Arrest for treason (1945)

On 2 May 1945, armed partisans arrived at the house while Pound was alone there at work on a translation. According to Kenner's account in The Pound Era, he stuffed a copy of Confucius in his pocket and surrendered himself to their HQ in Chiavari, although he was released shortly afterwards. What happened next is unclear: according to Stock, Pound gave himself up to an American soldier attached to the partisan group and was transported to a military post in the nearby town of Lavagna. Carpenter writes that partisans drove Pound and Olga to Lavagna, where they were taken to a bloody courtyard—the site of recent executions.

It was decided that Pound should be transported to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Frank Amprin following long-standing orders from the Attorney General that "in the event that Dr. Pound is taken in custody ... it is requested that he be thoroughly interrogated". Pound asked permission to contact President Truman by telegram to offer his help in final negotiations with Japan, given his knowledge of Japanese culture. He also wanted to deliver a final radio broadcast from a prepared script, in which he would recommend a post-war policy of leniency toward Italy and Germany. His requests were denied and the script forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI.

On 24 May he was transferred from Genoa to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa, following a cabled order from Washington that he was to be given no preferential treatment. DTC's temporary commander placed him in one of the camp's "death-cells"—a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, with no shelter, which was lit up all night by floodlights. Left in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, he at first held up well, believing he was soon to be transported to Washington. Within two weeks he began to fail physically and mentally, and the following week the medical staff moved him out of the cage. He underwent two psychiatric examinations, one of which found "premonitory symptoms of mental breakdown". He was transferred to a tent, where for a period he had nothing to read, although he was allowed reading material again after a third psychiatric evaluation. He began to write, and drafted the Pisan Cantos while in the camp; the existence of a few sheets of toilet paper on which the beginning of Canto LXXXIV is written suggests he may have begun the poem while still in the cage. He was transferred to the United States on 15 November. 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."

St. Elizabeths (1945–58)

On 25 November 1945 Pound 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 agitated at the arraignment, and was remanded to a Washington D.C. hospital where he underwent psychiatric evaluation. A week later he was admitted to St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital, and in June 1946 Dorothy became his legal guardian. She wanted him to be moved to a private sanatorium, which was impossible without dismissal of the charges or obtaining bail. A bail hearing was held on 29 January 1947 where a compromise was reached, whereby Pound was moved to more pleasant surroundings at the hospital's Chestnut Ward. Dorothy was allowed to visit him for several hours each day from that point on. He began to correspond and receive visitors, including Olga Rudge, while Mary, now married to Boris de Rachewiltz, began to translate his work into Italian.

E. Fuller Torrey believes he received special treatment at the hospital from the superintendent Winfred Overholser. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital where he wrote books, received visits from literary figures and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife. There's a belief that Pound may have faked insanity to avoid execution for treason, but Flory argues that his medical records, letters and the testimony of his visitors show clear evidence of psychosis. Tim Redman, author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, concedes that Pound's insanity plea may have been concocted by his friends, but finds the arguments unconvincing.

During 1946 and 1947 he submitted portions of the Pisan Cantos to a number of literary magazines. Laughlin published an edition in 1948, followed by Faber in 1949. When Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for them that year there was great public outrage, because of the antisemitism and the treason charge; the media said the award amounted to support for his actions, and a public debate ensued about "art for art's sake". The outrage was so deep after the treason charge that the imagined method of his execution—hanging or shooting—had 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". In August 1949, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said of Pound's poetry that it "cannot convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." It was the first and last time the Bollingen Prize was administered by the Library of Congress.

He continued his translation of Confucius, published in 1950. By the mid-1950s his privileges at the hospital were increased and he received visitors including Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. Olga visited again in 1952 and Mary a year later, spending the time with her father helping to organize his work. He was also visited by Hugh Kenner whose book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951), was influential in the later reassessment of his poetry.

Return to Italy and death (1958–72)

For many years Archibald MacLeish and Eliot led the effort to have Pound released from hospital. Robert Frost and Hemingway lent their support, but the effort stalled when white extremist John Kasper—who had often visited Pound—ran an "Ez for Prez" campaign. Hemingway believed Pound was incapable of abstaining from political statements and, as he wrote to MacLeish, "could see the media all too easily needling Pound into racist statements". Nevertheless Hemingway sent Pound a check for $1,500, which Pound never cashed, but had made into a paperweight. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine:

Ezra Pound is a great poet, and whatever he did he has been punished greatly and I believe should be freed to go and write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood. He was the master of T.S. Eliot. Eliot is a winner of the Nobel Prize. I believe it might well have gone to Pound ... I believe this would be a good year to release poets. There is a school of thought in America which, if encouraged far enough, could well believe that a man should be punished for the simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these standards, could well have spent his life in St. Elizabeths Hospital for errors of judgment and of pride.

In 1958 Pound finally hired an attorney to request dismissal of the indictment. It took a jury only minutes to decide and he was discharged on 7 May 1958. In July he arrived with Dorothy in Naples, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute by the waiting press. He and Dorothy lived with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen—where he met his grandchildren for the first time—and then returned to Rapallo. By December 1959 Flory writes he had fallen into a profound depression, insisting his work was worthless and The Cantos were botched. A move to Rome seemed to bring a brief respite. In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said progress on The Cantos was stuck because his health was poor. Soon after this he fell into a silence that was only rarely broken for much of the rest of his life.

A few months later he was briefly admitted to a clinic near Brunnenberg and readmitted in July 1961 after refusing to eat. He was furious when Olga and Mary had him readmitted, and when he learned of Hemingway's suicide a few days later he "went into a terrible tantrum, said American writers were all doomed, and the USA destroys all of them, especially the best of them". He was diagnosed with prostate and urinary tract problems, and moved to Rapallo for medical care. According to Wilhelm, Dorothy was too frail to continue tending her husband and he went to live with Olga. Flory believes Pound's mental breakdown was a manifestation of his psychosis, temporarily mitigated during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths. Those close to him attribute the breakdown to senile dementia. Despite his illness, he lived for another decade, which he attributed to Olga's care.

William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T. S. Eliot. Pound attended Eliot's funeral in London and during the trip traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow. During the mid-1960s he continued to travel and gave occasional public poetry readings. Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in 1967. Two years later he traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibition that featured his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land.

On his return to Italy he moved with Olga to Venice, where he lived the last years of his life mostly in silence, writing very little, and growing increasingly frail. In the last week of October 1972 he and Olga attended a Noh play and a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. A few days later, on his birthday, he was too weak to leave his bedroom, and the following night Olga had him admitted to hospital. He died on 1 November 1972, aged 87, and was buried on the island cemetery of San Michele in Venice. Dorothy died in London the following year. Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound.

Work

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. The shift to modernism appears as early as the Ripostes poems in 1912. Nadel argues that Pound found in Imagism a foundation on which to build, and by which to reject Victorian poetic traditions: "Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ... replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics." 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 with "the intensification of a single image". In its purest form Imagism was a form of minimalism, represented by Pound's two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro". Yet minimalism did not lend itself to the epic, and he therefore utilized the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.

The Cantos

According to Pound critic William O'Connor, The Cantos, filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, obscenities of various sorts", nearly impossible to read, though they have also been 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 their lack of coherence and form. Pound himself felt lack of form to be his great failure, and said of the work "I cannot make it cohere". He 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. They 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. Nadel argues they should be read as an epic poem, functioning as contemporary memoir, in which "personal history lyrical retrospection mingle", an idea most clearly represented in the Pisan Cantos. Albright believes the use of the term "canto" is an "allegation of a comprehensiveness of design that was never likely to be evident"; hell was permanent for Dante whereas in Pound hell is "a state that is always collapsing".

Pound's relationship to music is integral to his poetry. From his study of troubadour poetry—written to be sung and incorporating a "motz et son"—he believed all poetry should be written in a similar manner. In his essays he wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit". Ingham compares the form of The Cantos to a fugue; although they do not adhere to the traditions of the form, they explore multiple themes simultaneously. In this, Ingham views the use of counterpoint as integral to the structure and cohesion of The Cantos. He believes The Cantos have occurrences of multi-voiced counterpoint and, with the juxtaposition of images, developed non-linear themes. The pieces are presented in fragments, he writes, which "taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as music does".

Translations

Pound as a translator 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. He redefined the nature of poetic translations for the 20th century, according to Pound scholar Ming Xie. Pound's use of language in the translation is deliberate and precise, according to Xie, to avoid merely "trying to assimilate the original into contemporary language". Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting sections and adding others that had no basis in the original text, although critics argue that the fidelity of Cathay to the original Chinese is irrelevant. In his chapter "The Invention of China" from The Pound Era, Kenner contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems.

Legacy

Pound scholar Hugh Witemeyer argues that the Imagist movement was the most important movement in 20th-century English-language poetry, because every prominent poet of the period applied imagist theory and practice. Pound helped and influenced some the best-known of the modernist writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, George Oppen and Charles Olson.

Beyond his influence on the Imagist movement, opinion is divided on his legacy. Hugh Kenner wrote that there is no great contemporary writer who is less read than Pound. Peter Nicholls of the University of Sussex believes a central facet of his achievement is that his work has suggested different paths to different poets. During a Pound retrospective in the 1960s and 1970s, critics such as Kenner and Donald Davie brought a new appreciation to his work. His antisemitism is central to any evaluation of his poetry. The public and literary response to it went so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was only in the 1980s that critics began a re-evaluation. In her essay "Pound and antisemitism", Wendy Flory argues that Pound represented an unacknowledged national antisemitism, and that his vilification mitigated national guilt. Flory's view is that the best way of examining The Cantos is to separate the poetry from the antisemitism, although she concedes that the approach is perceived as apologetic.

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

Notes

1. ^ "Ezra Pound, Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 4-10-2010.
2. Stock 1970, p. 260
3. Witemeyer 1996, pp. 123–124
4. For some of the radio transcripts, see Doob 1978
   • For information about the broadcasts, see Gill 2005, pp. 115–116
   • For his mental breakdown, see Sieburth 2003, p. xiii
5. Elek, Jon. "Hugh Kenner", The Guardian, 28 November 2003. Retrieved 2010-2-10
6. For details about Thaddeus and Isabel, see Redman 1999, pp. 250–251. Thaddeus served as Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, was three-time member of the United States Congress and a candidate for Secretary of the Interior under President James A. Garfield. He supported the McKinley Tariff, was opposed to the free silver movement, disagreed with laissez-faire ideology, and backed government economic regulation.
7. ^ Wilhelm 2008, pp. xiii–xiv
8. ^ Nadel 2007, pp. 3–6
9. Moody 2007, pp. 59–60
10. qtd. in Wilhelm 2008, p. 25
11. Wilhelm 2008, pp. 3–11
12. ^ O'Connor 1963, p. 8
13. Stock 1970, pp. 65–67
14. Stock 1970, pp. 70–74
15. Carpenter 1988a, p. 133
16. Stock 1970, pp. 81–89
17. Wilhelm 2008, pp. 57–58
18. ^ Wilhelm 2008, pp. 62–65
19. Stock 1970, p. 95
20. Wilhelm 2008, pp. 67–69
21. ^ O'Connor 1963, pp. 20–22
22. Dennis 1999, p. 267
23. Moody 2007, p. 167
24. Wilhelm 2008, p. 80
25. ^ Moody 2007, p. 180
26. qtd. in Parini 1995, p. 13
27. ^ Moody 2007, p. 222
28. Stock 1970, pp. 119–146
29. Stock 1970, pp. 143–147
30. Moody 2007, p. 235
31. Bornstein 1999, p. 26
32. Stock 1970, pp. 146, 148–149
33. ^ Nadel 1999, pp. 1–6, 8
34. ^ Stock 1970, pp. 159, 161–169
35. ^ Moody 2007, p. 224
36. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 252–253
37. ^ Wilhelm 2008, pp. 153–154
38. ^ Moody 2007, pp. 249, 252
39. Moody 2007, p. 266
40. Moody 2007, pp. 278–284
41. Sieburth & Poems, p. 1215
42. Stock 1970, pp. 180–182
43. Carpenter 1988a, p. 280
44. Moody 2007, pp. 285–290
45. Albright 1999, pp. 59–62
46. Moody 2007, pp. 330–342
47. Moody 2007, pp. 343–349
48. Moody 2007, pp. 349–353
49. ^ Carpenter 1988a, p. 338
50. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 310–312
51. Moody 2007, pp. 357–369
52. Moody 2007, pp. 372–375
53. Moody 2007, pp. 387–388
54. Pound 1926, p. 191
    • For a discussion, see Witkoski 2007
55. Moody 2007, pp. 394–396, 409–410
56. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 384–385
57. ^ Kenner 1973, p. 384
58. Meyers 1985, p. 70–74
59. O'Connor 1963, p. 34
60. ^ Stock 1970, pp. 245–250
61. Bornstein 1999, pp. 33–34
62. Bloom 1986, p. 57
63. Meyers 1985, pp. 70–74
64. O'Connor 1963, p. 35
65. ^ Walters, Colin (November 4, 2001). "Old Ez and his Faithful Violinist". The Washington Times.
66. Carson 2001, pp. 1–3
67. Wilhelm 2008, pp. 249–251
68. Carson 2001, p. 4
69. Kenner 1973, p. 390
70. Stock 1970, pp. 252–256
71. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 430–431
72. Wilhelm 2008, p. 347
73. qtd. in Stock 1970, p. 260
74. Carpenter 1988a, p. 437
75. ^ Nadel 1999, pp. xxii–xxiii
76. Witkoski 2007
77. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 448–449
78. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 451–453
79. Carpenter 1988a, p. 453
80. Carpenter 1988a, pp. 454–456
81. Carpenter 1988a, p. 465
82. Stock 1970, pp. 260–265
83. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 20–21
84. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 22–24
85. Stock 1970, p. 289
86. Whittemeyer 1975, p. 264
87. Surette 1999, p. 2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSurette1999 (help)
88. Redman 1991, pp. 156–158
89. Stock 1970, pp. 295, 301–314
90. Stock 1973, pp. 306–307, 310 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFStock1973 (help)
91. Tryphonopoulos 2005, p. 176 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFTryphonopoulos2005 (help)
92. Wilhelm 1994, p. 99
93. Sieburth & Poems, pp. 1222–1223
94. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 136–142
95. Stock 1970, pp. 360–365
96. Modern American Poetry: Selected World War II Broadcasts reprinted from Doob 1978
97. ^ Stock 1970, pp. 368, 371, 390
98. ^ Carpenter 1988, pp. 583, 587 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCarpenter1988 (help)
99. Redman 1991, pp. 156–158, 170
100. Stock 1970, p. 383
101. ^ Nadel 1999, pp. xxv–xxiv
102. ^ O'Connor 1963, p. 43
103. Wilhelm 1994, p. 184
104. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 177–179
105. Nadel 1999, p. 20
106. Orwell, George. "The Question of the Pound Award", in George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose. David R. Godine Publisher, 2000, pp. 490–491.
107. ^ Stock 1973, pp. 400–401 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFStock1973 (help)
108. Wilhelm 1994, p. 203
109. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 206–207
110. Kenner 1973, pp. 470–471
111. Stock 1970, p. 407
112. ^ Carpenter 1988a, pp. 645–647
113. ^ Sieburth 2003, pp. x, xii–xiv
114. Kimpel 1981, pp. 470–474
115. qtd. in Meyers 1985, p. 514
116. Stock 1970, pp. 417–422
117. Mitgang, Herbert. "Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's 'insanity'," The New York Times, October 31, 1981. Retrieved 4 October 2010.
118. Flory 1999, pp. 286–287
119. Redman 1991, p. 6
120. Stock 1970, pp. 424–424
121. Nadel 2007, p. 17
122. ^ Flory 1999, pp. 285–286, 294–295
123. ^ "Canto Controversy" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. August 22, 1949. Retrieved 4 October 2010.
124. Stock 1970, p. 426
125. ^ Stock 1970, p. 428
126. Stock 1970, pp. 435–437
127. ^ Stock 1970, pp. 445–447
128. Reynolds 2000, p. 303
129. Goacher, Dennis. Foreword in Ezra Pound. Women of Trachis. New Directions Publishing, 1985, p. ix.
130. "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum' (subscription required)[[Category:Pages containing links to subscription-only content]]". The New York Times. July 10, 1958. Retrieved 4 October 2010. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); URL–wikilink conflict (help)
131. ^ Nadel 2007, p. 18
132. ^ Flory 1999, p. 296
133. Wilhelm 1994, pp. 331–332
     • Also see "Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5". The Paris Review (28). Summer–Fall 1962.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date format (link), later reprinted in Hall, Donald (1992). Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0899199798.
134. ^ Wilhelm 1994, pp. 333–335
135. qtd. in Albright 1999, p. 60
136. O'Connor 1963, p. 7
137. Witemeyer 1999, p. 47
138. Albright 1999, p. 60
139. "Ezra Pound, Poet of the state of Idaho". The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times. 21 July 1918. Retrieved 4 October 2010. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
140. Nicholls 1999, p. 144
141. Ingham 1999, p. 240
142. Xie 1999, p. 217
143. Albright 1999, pp. 76–77
144. Ingham 1999, pp. 236–237
145. Pound 1968, p. 103
146. Ingham 1999, pp. 244–245
147. Alexander 1998, p. 208
148. Alexander 1997, pp. 23–25
149. Xie 1999, pp. 204–212
150. Kenner 1970, p. 199 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKenner1970 (help)
151. Witemeyer 1999, p. 48
152. Bornstein 1999, pp. 22–23
153. Nadel 1999, pp. 8–9, 13
154. Nicholls 1999, p. 264
155. Alexander 1998, pp. 15–18

References

• Albright, Daniel (1999). "Early Cantos: I – XLI". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Alexander, Michael (1997). "Ezra Pound as Translator". Translation and Literature. 6 (1). Edinburgh University Press: 23–30. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Alexander, Michael (1998). The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-0981-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bloom, Harold (1986). T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. New York: Chelsea House. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Barnhisel, Greg (2005). "Laughlin, James (1914-1997)". In Tryphonopoulos, Demetres; Adams, Stephen (eds.). The Ezra Pound Encylopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-30448-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bornstein, George (1999). "Ezra Pound and the making of modernism". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Carpenter, Humphrey (1988a). A Serious Character: the life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-41678-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Carpenter, Humphrey (1988b). Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-46416-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Carson, Anne Conover (2001). Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08703-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dennis, Helen M. (1999). "Pound, women and gender". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doob, Leonard W., ed. (1978). Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313200-572. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Flory, Wendy (1999). "Pound and Antisemitism". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Gill, Jonathan (2005). "Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches on World War II". In Tryphonopoulos, Demetres; Adams, Stephen (eds.). The Ezra Pound Encylopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-30448-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ingham, Michael (1999). "Pound and music". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kenner, Hugh (1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520024274. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kimpel, Ben D.; Eaves, Duncan (1981). "More on Pound's Prison Experience". Ameican Literature. 53 (1). Duke University Press: 469–476. doi:10.2307/2926232.
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Moody, David A. (2007). Ezra Pound, Poet: The Young Genius 1885–1920. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199215577. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Nadel, Ira, ed. (1999). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Nadel, Ira, ed. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521853910. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Nicholls, Peter (1999). "Beyond the Cantos:Ezra Pound and recent American poetry". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521649209. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• O'Connor, William Van (1963). Ezra Pound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Parini, Jay, ed. (1995). "Introduction". The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-08122-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pound, Ezra (1926). Personæ (5th ed.). New York: New Directions. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pound, Ezra (1968). The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 0-8112-1646-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37305-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Redman, Tim (1999). "Pound's politics and economics". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Reynolds, Michael S. (2000). Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton. ISBN 9780393320473.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Sieburth, Richard (2003). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 0-8112-1558-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sieburth, Richard (2003). Poems and Translation. New York: The Library of America. ISBN 1-931082-41-3.
• Stock, Noel (1970). The LIfe of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-8654-7075-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Surrette, Leon (1999). Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois. ISBN 0-252-02498-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Whittemeyer, Reed (1975). William Carlos Williams: Poet from New Jersey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-20735-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972. University Park, PA: The University of Pennsylvania State Press. ISBN 0-271-01082-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wilhelm, James J. (2008). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925. University Park, PA: The University of Pennsylvania State Press. ISBN 9780271027982. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Witemeyer, Hugh (1999). "Early Poetry 1908–1920". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Witemeyer, Hugh, ed. (1996). Pound/Williams: Selected letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 0-8112-1301-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Witkoski, Michaell (2007). "Pound, Ezra (subscription required)". "Magill's Survey of American Literature" (Document). Salem Press. {{cite document}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |edition= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |accessdate= ignored (help)
• Xie, Ming (1999). "Pound as tranlator". In Nadel, Ira (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64920-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• Ezra Pound collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• Frequently Requested Records: Ezra Pound, United States Department of Justice

Audio recordings

• 1942 Radio Broadcast at the National Archives
• Pound's Collected Poetry Recordings, University of Pennsylvania, read by Pound

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