Pound, Ezra Weston Loomis 1885-1972
US poet, translator and critic

He was born in Hailey, Idaho, and brought up in Wyncote, near Philadelphia. He graduated from Pennsylvania University in 1906, became an instructor in Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and after four months left for Europe, travelling widely in Spain, Italy and Provence. He published his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento (1908, 'With Tapers Quenched'), in Venice. In London he met Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, and published Personae and Exultations in 1909, followed by a book of critical essays, The Spirit of Romance (1910). He was co-editor of Blast (1914-15), the magazine of the short-lived 'Vorticist' movement, and London editor of the Chicago Little Review (1917-19), and in 1920 became Paris correspondent for The Dial. From 1924 he made his home in Italy. He became involved with fascist ideas and created resentment by anti-democracy broadcasts in the early stages of World War I. In 1945 he was escorted back to the USA and indicted for treason. The trial did not proceed, however, as he was adjudged insane, and placed in an asylum until 1958 when he returned to Italy. In addition to poetry, he wrote books on literature, music, art and economics, and translated much from Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese. As a poet of the Imagist school at the outset of his career, he was a thoroughgoing experimenter, deploying much curious and often spurious learning in his illustrative imagery and in the development of his themes. T S Eliot regarded him as the motivating force behind 'modern' poetry, the poet who created a climate in which English and US poets could understand and appreciate each other. Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) are among his most important early poems. His Cantos, a loosely-knit series of poems, appeared first in 1917, continuing in many instalments, via the Pisan Cantos (1948) to Thrones: Cantos 96-109 (1959). His work in the classics and Chinese poetry are discernible in their form. Apart from his life work in poetry, his significant collections are Translations of Ezra Pound (1933) and Literary Essays (1954).

Bibliography: H Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); N Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (1970, revised edition 1982)