Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (Hailey, Idaho, 1885 - Venice, 1972) was an American poet and critic and one of the central figures of modernist poetry in English. He spent most of his adult life outside the United States, and his importance rests both on what he changed in verse and on the political controversies that marked his final decades.

Born into a family of English descent, he grew up between New York and Pennsylvania. He studied Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Hamilton College. In 1906 he travelled to Madrid, where he witnessed the attempted assassination of King Alfonso XIII, and he returned to the United States without finishing his doctorate. He then taught Spanish and French at Wabash College, which dismissed him in early 1908.

In 1908 he settled in London, where he found his footing as a poet. He worked as secretary to W. B. Yeats and wrote for periodicals such as The New Age. From that circle came Imagism, which stressed precision and economy of language, and shortly afterwards Vorticism, a name he coined in 1913 and which had the magazine Blast as its mouthpiece. He also helped bring the work of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Ernest Hemingway before readers, and he edited Eliot's The Waste Land.

His poetry drew on archaic forms and ancient languages. His versions of Li Po in Cathay (1915), based on notes by the orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, remain contested, since neither he nor Fenollosa read Chinese fluently. His major project, The Cantos, occupied him for decades. The first cantos appeared in 1917, and the work grew into a poem that is at once autobiographical, political and concerned with economics.

Around 1924 he moved to Italy, where he came to admire Mussolini and adopted Fascism, and where antisemitism increasingly surfaces in his writing. During the Second World War he recorded radio broadcasts for the Fascist government that attacked the United States and Jews. After American forces detained him in 1945, a court found him mentally unfit to stand trial, and he spent more than twelve years in a psychiatric hospital in Washington. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy.

His legacy carries this double character. As a poet he remains a reference point for modern literature, and his role in promoting other writers of his generation is widely recognised. As a public figure, his economic and political ideas keep his name at the centre of debate.