Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism , a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry.
In , he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until , when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. In , he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St.
Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in , Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, on November 1, He graduated in with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and then went back to the University of Pennsylvania to get his master's degree in romance languages, graduating in After that, Ezra Pound managed to irritate the head of the UPenn English Department, which resulted in him not getting his fellowship renewed.
Pound therefore decided to leave UPenn without finishing his doctorate. He decided to make a permanent move to London, and stayed there almost continuously for twelve years. During this time, Pound published a collection of poetry called Personae , which became his most successful work to date.
Together with Hilda Doolittle, who arrived in Europe in , and poet Richard Arlington, Pound began to develop a new literary movement called Imagism , which aimed for more clarity and less abstraction in language and poetry.
That same year, he became the London editor of the Little Review. In , the Pounds settled in Paris, but they were unhappy there and moved to Italy in If you enjoyed these interesting Ezra Pound facts, check out our interesting T. Eliot facts and, for more detail, our short history of T. Pingback: 10 T. Pound and H. She eventually broke it off, in part because he was involved with another woman.
Elizabeths Hospital a mental health facility where he lived quite comfortably for about 15 years. He had many literary visitors and is said to have kept the schedule for the tennis courts not far from his room. There is some evidence that the superintendent of that facility would have him re-certified as being unfit to stand trial to keep him out of the prison system. When he was released he pretty much headed straight back to Italy where he promptly gave the fascist salute upon stepping on Italian soil.
Pound's exact state of mind during this time has come into question over the years. In the early s, a full decade after Pound's death, a professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin presented evidence that Pound was indeed sane enough to stand trial for treason.
However, it was certainly true that Pound was healthy enough to work. During his imprisonment in Italy he finished the "Pisan Cantos," which The New York Times praised as "among the masterpieces of the century. Pound continued to write during his confinement at St. Elizabeths as well. There he completed additional sections of his long poem, "Section: Rock-Drill," published in , and "Thrones," which appeared in In , Frost spearheaded a successful campaign to free Pound from the comfortable confines of St.
Publicly, Pound spoke little about his work, but on the rare occasion he did, he described "The Cantos" as a failed work of poetry. Whether Pound truly felt that way about his defining work is often debated.
Pound passed away in Venice in and was buried on the cemetery island Isole di San Michele. Over the course of his long, productive lifetime, Pound published 70 books of his own writing, had a hand in some 70 others and authored more than 1, articles.
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