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Ezra Pound’s early life was amazingly ordinary. Born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, his family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he spent his childhood. He attended the University of Pennsylvania for two years, and then moved on to Hamilton College, where he studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages from 1903-1906 and received a degree in philosophy in 1905.
In 1908, Pound toured Europe as a journalist, and later that year, his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento, emerged. After the publication of A Lume Spento, Pound settled in London. There, with the help of Richard Aldington, Pound formed “Imagism,” a new philosophy concerning poetry. Influenced by the classical Chinese and Japanese poets that inspired Pound, Imagism focused on clarity, accuracy, and simplicity. Pound described Imagist poems as being composed “in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” An example of Imagist poetry is one of Pound’s most famous poems, “In A Station Of The Metro”:
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Although short, “In A Station Of The Metro” conveys Imagist style of “one-image poems.” Imagist poems deliver a clear and understandable image in a musical rhythm. Surprisingly, Pound soon lost interest in Imagism, and after a dispute with fellow American poet, Amy Lowell, began to address Imagism as “Amygism.” He significantly impacted contemporary poetry, not only with the creation of the Imagist movement, but by helping along the literary careers of such poets as Robert Frost, Ernest Hemmingway, William Carlos Williams (whom he met while at the University of Pennsylvania), W.B.Yeats, and T.S.Elliot.
In 1920, Pound left London and moved to Paris, and soon moved again in 1924 to Rapallo, Italy, where he met Benito Mussolini. Pound quickly became an avid supporter of Fascism and anti-Semitism, and throughout World War II he broadcast many anti-Semitic and Fascist speeches over American radio. In 1946, Pound — who was still a citizen of the United States — was arrested by the United States military and convicted of treason. He was later acquitted on the basis of insanity, and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Throughout his life after the 1920s, Pound wrote a series of poems, which he entitled The Cantos. While in the hospital, Pound’s political career was overlooked, and he was awarded the 1949 Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After years of lobbying by fans of his poetry, Pound was released from the asylum in 1958. He returned to Venice, where he lived until his death in 1972, at the respectable age of eighty-seven. What started as an ordinary life evolved into the life of a man who greatly influenced American contemporary poetry.
The Works of Ezra Pound:
- A Lume Spento (poetry) 1908
- A Quinzaine (poetry) 1908
- Personae (poetry) 1909
- Exultations (poetry) 1909
- Provenca (poetry) 1910
- Canzoni (poetry) 1911
- Ripostes of Ezra Pound (poetry) 1912
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (poetry) 1920
- Poems, 1918
1921
(poetry) 1921 - Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (poetry) 1926
- Selected Poems (poetry) 1928
- Make It New (prose) 1934
- The Fifth Decade of Cantos (poetry) 1937
- Polite Essays (prose) 1940
- The Pisan Cantos (poetry) 1948
- The Cantos of Ezra Pound (poetry) 1948
- Seventy Cantos (poetry) 1950
- Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization (essays) 1960