Poet and writer, born in Hailey, Idaho, USA. Brought up in Pennsylvania, he studied at Hamilton College, NY (1905 BPh), and the University of Pennsylvania (1906 MA). He taught at Wabash College, IN (1906), travelled in Europe (19067), then lived in London (190820), Paris (19204), and Italy (192445). He was arrested and jailed for treason by the USA (1945) because he had made public broadcasts in Italy during World War 2 supporting anti-Semitism and Fascism. Judged insane, he was committed to St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC, and released in 1958. He then returned to Italy. He was a founder of the imagist poetry movement and was editor of several intellectual periodicals, such as Poetry (191219), The Little Review (191719), and The Exile (19278). A prolific translator, literary critic, and poet, both as an editor and mentor he helped shape the poetry of the 20th-c, playing a major role, for instance, in the final version of T S Eliot's The Waste Land. Of his own work, he is most apt to be remembered for Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) and for his Cantos, a series of poems written over many years (191770).
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate, poet, musician, and critic who, along with T. The critic Hugh Kenner said on meeting Pound: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."
Early life and contemporaries
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, United States to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound.
Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal.
The London Revolution
Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese characters Pound developed into what he called the Ideogrammic Method. In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W.B.
In the years before the First World War, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism, and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that Pound described as “For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Po], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.". Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse translations celebrated for their ease of diction and conversationality. Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most successful realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether or not the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no basis in the original texts. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter entitled "The Invention of China," contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a book about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems.
The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.
Paris
In 1920, Pound moved to Paris where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians and writers who were revolutionising the whole world of modern art. He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" which introduced one of the major personas of the poem.
Italy
On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound, arriving penniless.
At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed.
In Italy Pound became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings.
Aside from his political sympathy with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his mistress Olga Rudge: Mary (or Maria) Rudge was a young woman in her late teens who had lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had difficulty relocating to America (even though she had American as well as Italian citizenship.)
Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of the Second World War, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941.
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable.
In July 1943, the southern half of Italy was overrun by Allied forces. Pound played a significant role in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945.
On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." This section of the work in progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world.
St. Elizabeths
After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Saló Republic (evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States). Pound's controversial insanity plea is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author and collaborator Knut Hamsun, who was similarly dubbed insane by embarassed authorities despite evidence (in the form of subsequent published material) to the contrary.
Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. Pound was conceited and flamboyant, not to say obsessive, which in psychiatric terms became "grandiosity of ideas and beliefs."
By contrast, E. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote three books, received visits from literary celebrities and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife and several mistresses. At St. Elizabeths, Pound was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics.
One of Pound's most frequent visitors was the then-chairman of the States' Rights Democratic Party, with whom Pound used to discuss strategy and tactics on how best to rally public support for the preservation of racial segregation in the American South.
Pound was also befriended there by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pound's poetry. Pound was most happy in his relations with fellow-poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to Pound’s tragic situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths," and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukosfsky were among Pound's visitors, as was Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983). Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish.
Return to Italy and Death
On his release, Pound returned to Italy where he continued writing, but his old certainties had deserted him. Allen Ginsberg, in an interview with Michael Reck, stated that Pound seemed to regret many of his past actions, and that he regretted that his work was tainted with "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism" , although contemporaneous letters published in recent years indicate that he was still unrepentently anti-Semitic. Pound died in Venice in 1972.
Musical Quality of Pound's Poetry
Pound's The Cantos, one of the 20th century's most important literary works, is a poem that contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs --though it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz el sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." But having translated texts from ten different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and Francois Villon. While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice composer, writing privately that he intended a revolt against the impressionistic music of Debussy. An autodidact, Pound described his working method as "improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present 'laws'..." With only a few formal lessons in music composition, Pound produced a small body of work, including a setting of Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno," for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of Francois Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; Pound began composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, London pianist and vocal coach. Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar Robert Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design.
During the fecund Paris years of 1921-1924, Pound formed close friendships with the American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's touring partner, the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound championed Antheil's music and asked his help in devising a system of micro-rhythms that would more accurately render the vitalistic speech rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le Testament. Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview concerts of Le Testament, but insisted to Pound that the meter was impractical.
In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of troubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another melody," as Pound puts it, the work spawns a polyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable" rhythm conducted in the laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship between words and music.
After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a musician's music," he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's music since Thomas Campion.
Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque pointillistic orchestration and derives its vitality from complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on extensions of melody. Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the opera's numbers are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time the relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME," distinguishes his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches;
Pound's iconoclastic music can be compared to that of his contemporary, Charles Ives. Both subjected melody to sophisticated techniques of juxtaposition and layering, Pound shaping melody with literary textures and Ives with harmonic and contrapuntal textures. Pound selected from a vocal gamut of plainchant, homophony, troubadour melodies, bel canto and nineteenth century opera clichés, as well as 20th-century polyrhythms and cabaret style singing.
Pound's music theories are reactionary and revolutionary, irascible and philosophic.
Importance
Because of his political views, especially his support of Mussolini and his anti-Semitism, Pound attracted much criticism throughout the second half of the twentieth century. As historical revisionist models of criticism wane, however, it seems as though Pound scholars are becoming interested in his words and not his views. Pound's perceived importance has varied over the years. The location of Pound -- as opposed to other writers such as T.S. Eliot -- at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic Hugh Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement titled The Pound Era. The critic Marjorie Perloff has also insisted upon the centrality of Pound to numerous traditions of "experimental" poetry in the 20th century.
As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of parataxis which had a major influence on his poetry.
As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped the careers of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D.
Immediately before the first world war Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists (Pound coined the word). Pound did much to publicize the movement and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of the wider public (he was particularly important in the artistic careers of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis).
As translator, although his mastery of languages is open to question, Pound did much to introduce Provençal and Chinese poetry to English speaking audiences. For example, insofar as major poets such as Cavalcanti and Du Fu, are known to the English speaking world, it is mainly because of Pound.
In the early 1920s in Paris, Pound became interested in music, and was probably the first serious writer in the 20th century to praise the work of the long-neglected Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi and to promote early music generally.
The secret to Pound's seemingly bizarre theories and political commitments perhaps lie in his occult and mystical interests, which biographers have only recently begun to document. 'The Birth of Modernism' by Leon Surette is perhaps the best introduction to this aspect of Pound's thought.
Selected works
Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ezra Pound 1908 A Lume Spento, poems. 1915 Cathay, poems / translations. 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. 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems. 1927 Exile, poems 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17-27, poems. 1933 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems. 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. 1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems. 1951 Confucian analects, translated by Ezra Pound. 1997 Ezra Pound and Music, essays.Audio recordings
Recording of "Usura" Canto XLV, read by Pound (mp3). Recording of sections from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and others, read by Pound (RealAudio). "The Four Steps" talk, in which Pound outlines his antipathy towards all forms of bureacracy - BBC Home Service 21 June 1958 (RealAudio).
Readings of Ezra Pound's work by other than author
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