Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II.
[3] He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler.
[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.
According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.
[58] In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
[67] Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint.
The newspapers interviewed him,[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".
[80] In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic.
[95] "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, "Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith.
Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer,[109] that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language.
[125] Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist, which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite the printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about prostitutes.
[136] It included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by H. D., followed by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Lowell, Carlos Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by Pound, then Hueffer (as he was known as the time), Allen Upward and John Cournos.
During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it as a symbol of what he called Les Nagistes, a school created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends with "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!"
[146] Lowell agreed to finance an annual anthology of Imagiste poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule.
Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ' ἐνι Τροίῃ[n] Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
[He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ..."[192] With all this, however, Mr.
[200] Unlike Hemingway, Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend his time in salons[201] or building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore.
[215] In the view of Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell, it is a great religious poem, describing humanity's journey from hell to paradise, a "revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe ... the kind of intelligence that makes the cherrystone become a cherry tree.
Rudge and Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in Gais, South Tyrol, whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month.
[254][v] A friend of Pound's, the writer Lina Caico, wrote to him in March 1937 asking him to use his musical contacts to help a German-Jewish pianist in Berlin who did not have enough money to live on because of the Nuremberg Laws.
Normally willing to help fellow artists, Pound replied (at length): "You hit a nice sore spot ... Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England.
[331] On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cages, with tar paper covers, lit up at night by floodlights.
[332] He recorded what seemed to be a breakdown in "Canto LXXX", where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me".
[351] The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer.
[365] Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature,[366] telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire, not one line, in Pound".
[373] In November 1953 he wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti that Hitler was "bit by dirty Jew mania for World Domination, as yu used to point out/ this WORST of German diseases was got from yr/ idiolized and filthy biblical bastards.
[390] In the New Times in April 1956, Pound wrote: "Our Victorian forebears would have been greatly scandalized at the idea that one might not be free to study inherited racial characteristics," and "Some races are retentive, mainly of the least desirable bits of their barbaric past."
Unable to deny the manifest greatness of a literary giant but concerned lest Pound's 'other ideas' gain acceptance, [Ginsberg] employs one of the oldest tricks in the book: he tries to have the master himself recant.
[453] In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, H.D., Aldington, and Aiken, he befriended and helped Cummings, Bunting, Ford, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.
[459] "This is an accusation less against the fantastic arrogance of Pound", he wrote, "than against the narrow-minded obscurantism of the departments of English and the critical establishment who have set up a system of apologetics which the slyest Jesuit of the seventeenth century would have baulked at.
