
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30 1885 – November 1 1972) was an United States poetry, musician and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the Modernist poetry movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. 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. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College. During this period, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D., to whom he was engaged for a time. He taught at Wabash College for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908, he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice. ==The London Revolution== BLAST_(journal)''.">Image:Blast2.jpg|left|thumbnail|The cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine ''BLAST (journal)''. 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. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme , he began to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England, eventually being employed as the Irish poetry poet's secretary. He was also interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. Yeats and Pound were instrumental in helping each other modernise their poetry. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese literature, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan. In 1914, he married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist. In the years before the World War I, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism and Vorticism. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as perhaps the central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's ''The Waste Land'', the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention. However, the war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilisation 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, France 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'', which increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics, as well as writing critical prose, translations and composing two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ''ménage à trois'' which was to last until the end of the poet's life. ==Italy== [[Image:Ezra Pound copy - James Legge - The Book of Poetry (Shih Ching).jpg|left|thumb|200px|Ezra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of the Book of Poetry (Shi Jing), in the Sacred Books of the East.]] In the mid 1920s Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy, where he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors. At this time Pound also organised an annual series of concerts in Rapallo where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. In Italy Pound became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings. Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of the Second World War. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and his opposition to the war and his anti-Semitism were apparent on occasions. Towards the end of the war, he was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending twenty-five days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the ''Pisan Cantos'' in the camp. 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 in what has been considered as some of the first ecology poetry in English language. The ''Pisan Cantos'' won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948. ==St. Elizabeths== After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. He was found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958, when he was released and sent back to Italy, where he died in 1972. Pound was conceited and flamboyant, to say the least, which in psychiatric terms became "grandiosity of ideas and beliefs". The insanity case against Pound is widely believed to be an example of state abuse, effectively imprisoning Pound without a trial. By contrast, E. Fuller Torrey believed that Mussolini's propagandist was coddled by Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. 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. (Torrey exposed the relationship between Overholser and Pound in a 1981 ''Psychology Today'' and later, the book ''The Roots of Treason''.) At St. Elizabeths, he was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on ''The Cantos'' as well as translating the Confucian classics. Many of the poets and artists who frequently visited Pound would have been horrified to learn that another of his 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 befriended there by Guy Davenport, and subsequently Davenport wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as ''Cities on Hills'' in 1983), a work that was highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pound's poetry. Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost. He was still considered incurably insane but not dangerous to others. ==Return to Italy== On his release, Pound returned to Italy where he continued writing, but his old certainties had deserted him. Although he continued working on ''The Cantos'', he seemed to view them as an artistic failure. He also seemed to regret many of his past actions, and in a 1967 interview with Allen Ginsberg he apologised for "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism". He died in Venice in 1972. ==Importance== Because of his political views, especially his support of Mussolini and his anti-Semitism, Pound continues to attract much criticism. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the vital role he played in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. This importance may be considered under four headings: poet, critic, promoter, and translator. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivist poets and ''The Cantos'' were a touchstone for Ginsberg and other Beat generation poets. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century is in his debt. As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped the careers of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Olson and other modernist writers too numerous to mention as well as neglected earlier writers like Walter Savage Landor and Gavin Douglas. 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 publicise the movement and was instrumental in bringing the movement to 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 literature poetry, the Noh, Anglo-Saxon poetry and the Confucius classics to a modern Western audience. He also translated and championed Greek language and Latin classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education was in decline. 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. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects. 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== * 1908 ''A Lume Spento'', poems. * 1908 ''A Quinzaine for This Yule'', poems. * 1909 ''Personae'', poems. * 1909 ''Exultations, poems. * 1910 ''Provenca'', poems. * 1910 ''The Spirit of Romance'', essays. * 1911 ''Canzoni'', poems. * 1912 ''Ripostes of Ezra Pound'', poems. * 1912 ''Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti'', translations. * 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. * 1917 ''Lustra of Ezra Pound'', poems. * 1917 ''Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle'', translations. * 1918 ''Quia Pauper Amavi'', poems. * 1918 ''Pavannes and Divisions'', essays. * 1919 ''The Fourth Canto'', poems. * 1920 ''Umbra'', poems and translations. * 1920 ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', poems. * 1921 ''Poems, 1918-1921'', poems. * 1922 ''The Natural Philosophy of Love'', by Remy de Gourmount, translations. * 1923 ''Indiscretions'', essays. * 1924 ''Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony'', essays. * 1925 ''A Draft of XVI Cantos'', poems. * 1927 ''Exile'', poems * 1928 ''A Draft of the Cantos 17-27'', poems. * 1928 ''Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language'', translation. * 1930 ''Imaginary Letters'', essays. * 1931 ''How to Read'', essays. * 1933 ''A Draft of XXX Cantos'', poems. * 1933 ''ABC of Economics'', essays. * 1934 ''Homage to Sextus Propertius'', poems. * 1934 ''Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI'', poems. * 1934 ''ABC of Reading'', essays. * 1935 ''Make It New'', essays. * 1936 ''Chinese written character as a medium for poetry'', by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound. * 1936 ''Jefferson and/or Mussolini'', essays. * 1937 ''The Fifth Decade of Cantos'', poems. * 1937 ''Polite Essays'', essays. * 1937 ''Digest of the Analects'', by Confucius, translation. * 1938 ''Culture'', essays. * 1939 ''What Is Money For?'', essays. * 1940 ''Cantos LII-LXXI'', poems. * 1944 ''L'America, Roosevelt e le Cause della Guerra Presente'', essays. * 1944 ''Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.'', prose. * 1947 ''Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest'', translation. * 1948 ''The Pisan Cantos'', poems. * 1950 ''Seventy Cantos'', poems. * 1951 ''Confucian analects'', translated by Ezra Pound. * 1956 ''Section Rock-Drill, 85-95 de los Cantares'', poems. * 1956 ''Women of Trachis'', by Sophocles, translation. * 1959 ''Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares'', poems. * 1968 ''Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII'', poems. ==References== * Humphrey Carpenter (1988). ''A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound.'' Boston: Houghton Mifflin. * Hugh Kenner (1973). ''The Pound Era''. Berkeley: University of California Press. * Longenbach, James (1991). ''Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism.'' New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Oderman, Kevin (1986). ''Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium.'' Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. * Redman, Tim (1991). ''Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Stock, Noel (1970). ''Life of Ezra Pound.'' London: Routledge & Kegan Paul * Surette, Leon (1994). ''The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult.'' McGill-Queen's University Press. ==External links== *[http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm Pound at Modern American Poetry] *[http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/pound/ Pound at EPC] *[http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/ballentine/ Pound and the Occult] *[http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_pound_chinese.html Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character] *[http://www.internal.org/list_poems.phtml?authorID=1 A collection of Pound's poetry] Modernism Imagists Vorticists Ezra Pound 1885 births 1972 deaths People from Idaho
== Cantos absent? == The introduction feels unsatisfactory in that it doesn't mention the Cantos and that it features a typically-opaque Kenner squib. It seems to me that long after there is no-one alive who cares what Modernism and Imagism were, there will be people who read and love (or hate) the Cantos. I'm a fairly-serious student of EP, and while I respect Kenner's achievement, he doesn't belong in the introductory paragraph. Absent some push-back, I will adjust the introduction to include the Cantos and exclude Kenner User:TimBray 09:09, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC) :I agree. This article is on my list of things to do once The Cantos is finished, but if you want to do it, great. The Pound article could be 3 times its curent size. User:Filiocht 08:44, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC) == Scholarship statements NPOV == This portion: ''It is worth noting he was a shoddy scholar, and was always looking to cut corners. His translations often have laughable errors. His Chinese translations especially are not taken terribly serious.'' doesn't sound like NPOV. A reputable encyclopedia article would not contain the word "shoddy". I request that someone refine this, and perhaps through in examples of poor quality in his translation. User:Kricxjo 16:17, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC) :The following sounds like an editorial rather than a set of facts about Pound. ''Scholarship was not, of course, the point. Literal translations were not his intention; Pound was a poet, not an academic scholar. His concern was to breathe new air into voices of antiquity. Reading Confucius in English is quite different from reading it in the original. The question was how to translate a text so it lives again, almost as a contemporary work, in a new language and new time.''- 26 september == Filiocht rewrite == If anyone is interested, I am rewriting this article at User:Filiocht/Ezra Pound and intend moving that rewrite to here when completed unless anyone objects? User:Filiocht 12:01, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC) Here's the text I am overwriting for handy reference (User:Filiocht 14:45, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)): :Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 - November 1, 1972) was a poet and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the modernist movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. :Hugh Kenner, on meeting Pound: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism." :Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (where at age 16, he met William Carlos Williams, then a young medical student) and at Hamilton College. He taught at Wabash College for less than a year, and afterward settled in London, after months in Venice. He had thought W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England. His intelligence, confidence and verve found him a place in London's premier artistic circles. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914. In 1924, he moved to Italy, settling in Rapallo. :Pound's early books created a sensation in England, and he was considered the cutting edge in the years just prior to World War I. Yeats was moved by Pound's work to modify his own style, abandoning the pre-Raphaelite techniques that characterized his early poetry. :He lived in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France for a time during the gathering of great artists. Frequently, Pound could be seen at the café Le Dome, playing chess on the terrace with Ford Madox Ford. :In the early 30s Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy. Economics became his obsession and Mussolini his great hope. He compared the Fascist to the princes of Renaissance Italy. During World War II he volunteered to speak on cultural subjects on Italian radio. The broadcasts are overtly political, however, and his political sentiments were clear enough: he hated Roosevelt, and the usury of world banking - which he pinned on the Jews. The Allies would lose the war, he thought. And wars were needless--they were started only to create debt--he thought. :After the war he was incarcerated outdoors in an open cage (the infamous "gorilla cage") at Pisa for twenty-five days, then for medical reasons (he considered himself broken by his time in the cage) in a tent. During the six months spent at Pisa living with the American GIs he worked on his translation of Confucius and wrote the Pisan Cantos. :"The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent/ shoulders" they begin, written on scraps of paper and using a typewriter in the medical tent after-hours. For books, Pound had the Chinese of Confucius, possibly James Legge's translation too, a Chinese dictionary, all of which he pocketed before the MPs took him away, an anthology of verse he found at the latrine, & a standard military issue Bible. The setting of these Cantos is as much Pound's memory, specifically of London, as the Italian landscape, and the collapse of Fascist Italy. :He was transferred to the US and tried for treason, found insane and subsequently imprisoned in a mental institution in Washington, D.C. (St. Elizabeth's Hospital) for 12 years. :Distinguished and recognized writers, in spite of Pound's politics, awarded him the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award for the Pisan Cantos. :Repeated appeals from writers earned him release from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to Italy, settling in Venice, where he was to complete his life. :In terms of his views on translation, the back cover of Pound's Confucius offers, "Pound never wanted to be a literal translator. What he could do, as no other could, is to identify the essence, pick out 'what matters now,' and phrase it so pungently, so beautifully, that it will stick in the head and start new thinking." :The 800-odd paged Cantos, which Pound described as "a poem including history", was his major work. The two line haiku-like In a Station of the Metro is well known and frequently anthologized. :Allen Ginsberg said, "He was the poet of the age." after the news came that Pound had died. :In addition to his poetry, Pound would be remembered as a great advocate for poets, the classics, the arts; in fact, as he viewed it, he was pushing for a new civilization. He tirelessly promoted artists he thought were creating innovative, good work. Upon seeing Robert Frost's first book and recognizing his talent, he took up Frost in England and quickly became an informal advocate. He was instrumental or absolutely vital in getting James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot published. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was heavily pared by Pound, which led Eliot to dedicate the poem to him, "the better craftsman" (in Italian, which were Dante's words.) Pound wrote extensively on the arts, including a book-length "Guide to Kulchur", and "ABC of Reading". Charles Olson, one of many directly influenced by "Old Ez", expressed at Berkeley in 1965, his thought that Pound had freed the languages of the world. :"The thought of what America would be like/ If the classics had a wide circulation/ Ah, well, it troubles my sleep." :"No man ever knows enough about any art." (Guide to Kulchur) == Article too reverent == I'm sorry, but this article is far too reverent. Pound's reputation as a poet is very much open to question, and the article should reflect that. There were numerous qualifications in the earlier versions that seem to have been systematically removed. Things I have a problem with: - why include the Kenner quote at all? -"he convinced his mentor to adopt a more direct way of writing, helping to bring about Yeats' mature style." This interpretation of Yeat's development has been in question for thirty years now, since Harold Bloom's study. ***But mss and typescripts of Yeats poems with Pound's (accepted) suggestions exist. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"His translations of Japanese Noh plays influenced Yeats' writing" - Pound didn't translate from Japanese; he didn't know Japanese, and the only influence on Yeats was the idea of Noh drama rather than any actual texts ***Pounds workings of Noh plays from Felonosa's notes were well known to Yeats. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -for that matter, why have the references to Pound's exaggeration of his translation skills been removed? Is there some reason that people looking up information on Pound should not be told that he didn't know Chinese or Japanese? -"Imagism and Vorticism. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce" - neither of those movements had anything to do with Joyce ***Joyce was in the Imigast anthology. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"can be seen as perhaps the central events in the birth of English-language modernism." or perhaps not **** Hence the perhaps. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward." I don't find this to be a NPOV statement; some of us - a lot of us - think The Cantos were a complete wrong turn that went nowhere. ***Clearly refers to Pound's way forward. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions." somehow it has to be noted that many do not consider his efforts successful -"He also translated and championed Greek and Latin classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education was in decline." Pound did not do that much classical translation, and I don't think he's ever been considered particularly important in keeping classical learning going. User:66.190.242.110 4:12, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) Why not create a user account and add what you feel you want added? User:Filiocht == Facism and Anti-Semitism == I could not source the statement that Ezra Pound's anti-semitic leanings had their genesis at the University of Idaho. According to the University of Idaho library, though he was a fixture within its library, his tastes in reading ran more to the left and radicalism than towards facism. I removed the statement. Can someone source it correctly? :Most scholars agree that Pound's anti-semitism dates from the 1930s, and almost everybody misses the fact that there is more anti-Christian and anti-Buddhist sentiment in his writings than anti-Jewish. While not at all wishing to deny that Pound was, for a long period of time, clearly anti-semitic, this article seems to be overly concerned with this aspect of his life, to the detriment of any serious discussion of the important role he played in 20th C English-language poetry. Now that I have finished working on The Cantos, I hope to do some work here, meanwhile I absolutely agree that theis statement should be removed until a decent attribution is given. User:Filiocht 08:57, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30 1885 – November 1 1972) was an United States poetry, musician and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the Modernist poetry movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. 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. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College. During this period, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D., to whom he was engaged for a time. He taught at Wabash College for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908, he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice. ==The London Revolution== BLAST_(journal)''.">Image:Blast2.jpg|left|thumbnail|The cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine ''BLAST (journal)''. 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. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme , he began to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England, eventually being employed as the Irish poetry poet's secretary. He was also interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. Yeats and Pound were instrumental in helping each other modernise their poetry. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese literature, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan. In 1914, he married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist. In the years before the World War I, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism and Vorticism. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as perhaps the central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's ''The Waste Land'', the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention. However, the war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilisation 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, France 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'', which increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics, as well as writing critical prose, translations and composing two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ''ménage à trois'' which was to last until the end of the poet's life. ==Italy== [[Image:Ezra Pound copy - James Legge - The Book of Poetry (Shih Ching).jpg|left|thumb|200px|Ezra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of the Book of Poetry (Shi Jing), in the Sacred Books of the East.]] In the mid 1920s Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy, where he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors. At this time Pound also organised an annual series of concerts in Rapallo where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. In Italy Pound became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings. Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of the Second World War. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and his opposition to the war and his anti-Semitism were apparent on occasions. Towards the end of the war, he was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending twenty-five days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the ''Pisan Cantos'' in the camp. 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 in what has been considered as some of the first ecology poetry in English language. The ''Pisan Cantos'' won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948. ==St. Elizabeths== After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. He was found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958, when he was released and sent back to Italy, where he died in 1972. Pound was conceited and flamboyant, to say the least, which in psychiatric terms became "grandiosity of ideas and beliefs". The insanity case against Pound is widely believed to be an example of state abuse, effectively imprisoning Pound without a trial. By contrast, E. Fuller Torrey believed that Mussolini's propagandist was coddled by Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. 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. (Torrey exposed the relationship between Overholser and Pound in a 1981 ''Psychology Today'' and later, the book ''The Roots of Treason''.) At St. Elizabeths, he was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on ''The Cantos'' as well as translating the Confucian classics. Many of the poets and artists who frequently visited Pound would have been horrified to learn that another of his 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 befriended there by Guy Davenport, and subsequently Davenport wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as ''Cities on Hills'' in 1983), a work that was highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pound's poetry. Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost. He was still considered incurably insane but not dangerous to others. ==Return to Italy== On his release, Pound returned to Italy where he continued writing, but his old certainties had deserted him. Although he continued working on ''The Cantos'', he seemed to view them as an artistic failure. He also seemed to regret many of his past actions, and in a 1967 interview with Allen Ginsberg he apologised for "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism". He died in Venice in 1972. ==Importance== Because of his political views, especially his support of Mussolini and his anti-Semitism, Pound continues to attract much criticism. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the vital role he played in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. This importance may be considered under four headings: poet, critic, promoter, and translator. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivist poets and ''The Cantos'' were a touchstone for Ginsberg and other Beat generation poets. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century is in his debt. As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped the careers of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Olson and other modernist writers too numerous to mention as well as neglected earlier writers like Walter Savage Landor and Gavin Douglas. 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 publicise the movement and was instrumental in bringing the movement to 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 literature poetry, the Noh, Anglo-Saxon poetry and the Confucius classics to a modern Western audience. He also translated and championed Greek language and Latin classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education was in decline. 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. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects. 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== * 1908 ''A Lume Spento'', poems. * 1908 ''A Quinzaine for This Yule'', poems. * 1909 ''Personae'', poems. * 1909 ''Exultations, poems. * 1910 ''Provenca'', poems. * 1910 ''The Spirit of Romance'', essays. * 1911 ''Canzoni'', poems. * 1912 ''Ripostes of Ezra Pound'', poems. * 1912 ''Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti'', translations. * 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. * 1917 ''Lustra of Ezra Pound'', poems. * 1917 ''Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle'', translations. * 1918 ''Quia Pauper Amavi'', poems. * 1918 ''Pavannes and Divisions'', essays. * 1919 ''The Fourth Canto'', poems. * 1920 ''Umbra'', poems and translations. * 1920 ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', poems. * 1921 ''Poems, 1918-1921'', poems. * 1922 ''The Natural Philosophy of Love'', by Remy de Gourmount, translations. * 1923 ''Indiscretions'', essays. * 1924 ''Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony'', essays. * 1925 ''A Draft of XVI Cantos'', poems. * 1927 ''Exile'', poems * 1928 ''A Draft of the Cantos 17-27'', poems. * 1928 ''Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language'', translation. * 1930 ''Imaginary Letters'', essays. * 1931 ''How to Read'', essays. * 1933 ''A Draft of XXX Cantos'', poems. * 1933 ''ABC of Economics'', essays. * 1934 ''Homage to Sextus Propertius'', poems. * 1934 ''Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI'', poems. * 1934 ''ABC of Reading'', essays. * 1935 ''Make It New'', essays. * 1936 ''Chinese written character as a medium for poetry'', by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound. * 1936 ''Jefferson and/or Mussolini'', essays. * 1937 ''The Fifth Decade of Cantos'', poems. * 1937 ''Polite Essays'', essays. * 1937 ''Digest of the Analects'', by Confucius, translation. * 1938 ''Culture'', essays. * 1939 ''What Is Money For?'', essays. * 1940 ''Cantos LII-LXXI'', poems. * 1944 ''L'America, Roosevelt e le Cause della Guerra Presente'', essays. * 1944 ''Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.'', prose. * 1947 ''Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest'', translation. * 1948 ''The Pisan Cantos'', poems. * 1950 ''Seventy Cantos'', poems. * 1951 ''Confucian analects'', translated by Ezra Pound. * 1956 ''Section Rock-Drill, 85-95 de los Cantares'', poems. * 1956 ''Women of Trachis'', by Sophocles, translation. * 1959 ''Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares'', poems. * 1968 ''Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII'', poems. ==References== * Humphrey Carpenter (1988). ''A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound.'' Boston: Houghton Mifflin. * Hugh Kenner (1973). ''The Pound Era''. Berkeley: University of California Press. * Longenbach, James (1991). ''Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism.'' New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Oderman, Kevin (1986). ''Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium.'' Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. * Redman, Tim (1991). ''Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Stock, Noel (1970). ''Life of Ezra Pound.'' London: Routledge & Kegan Paul * Surette, Leon (1994). ''The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult.'' McGill-Queen's University Press. ==External links== *[http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm Pound at Modern American Poetry] *[http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/pound/ Pound at EPC] *[http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/ballentine/ Pound and the Occult] *[http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_pound_chinese.html Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character] *[http://www.internal.org/list_poems.phtml?authorID=1 A collection of Pound's poetry] Modernism Imagists Vorticists Ezra Pound 1885 births 1972 deaths People from Idaho
Ezra Pound
== Cantos absent? == The introduction feels unsatisfactory in that it doesn't mention the Cantos and that it features a typically-opaque Kenner squib. It seems to me that long after there is no-one alive who cares what Modernism and Imagism were, there will be people who read and love (or hate) the Cantos. I'm a fairly-serious student of EP, and while I respect Kenner's achievement, he doesn't belong in the introductory paragraph. Absent some push-back, I will adjust the introduction to include the Cantos and exclude Kenner User:TimBray 09:09, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC) :I agree. This article is on my list of things to do once The Cantos is finished, but if you want to do it, great. The Pound article could be 3 times its curent size. User:Filiocht 08:44, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC) == Scholarship statements NPOV == This portion: ''It is worth noting he was a shoddy scholar, and was always looking to cut corners. His translations often have laughable errors. His Chinese translations especially are not taken terribly serious.'' doesn't sound like NPOV. A reputable encyclopedia article would not contain the word "shoddy". I request that someone refine this, and perhaps through in examples of poor quality in his translation. User:Kricxjo 16:17, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC) :The following sounds like an editorial rather than a set of facts about Pound. ''Scholarship was not, of course, the point. Literal translations were not his intention; Pound was a poet, not an academic scholar. His concern was to breathe new air into voices of antiquity. Reading Confucius in English is quite different from reading it in the original. The question was how to translate a text so it lives again, almost as a contemporary work, in a new language and new time.''- 26 september == Filiocht rewrite == If anyone is interested, I am rewriting this article at User:Filiocht/Ezra Pound and intend moving that rewrite to here when completed unless anyone objects? User:Filiocht 12:01, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC) Here's the text I am overwriting for handy reference (User:Filiocht 14:45, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)): :Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 - November 1, 1972) was a poet and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the modernist movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. :Hugh Kenner, on meeting Pound: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism." :Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (where at age 16, he met William Carlos Williams, then a young medical student) and at Hamilton College. He taught at Wabash College for less than a year, and afterward settled in London, after months in Venice. He had thought W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England. His intelligence, confidence and verve found him a place in London's premier artistic circles. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914. In 1924, he moved to Italy, settling in Rapallo. :Pound's early books created a sensation in England, and he was considered the cutting edge in the years just prior to World War I. Yeats was moved by Pound's work to modify his own style, abandoning the pre-Raphaelite techniques that characterized his early poetry. :He lived in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France for a time during the gathering of great artists. Frequently, Pound could be seen at the café Le Dome, playing chess on the terrace with Ford Madox Ford. :In the early 30s Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy. Economics became his obsession and Mussolini his great hope. He compared the Fascist to the princes of Renaissance Italy. During World War II he volunteered to speak on cultural subjects on Italian radio. The broadcasts are overtly political, however, and his political sentiments were clear enough: he hated Roosevelt, and the usury of world banking - which he pinned on the Jews. The Allies would lose the war, he thought. And wars were needless--they were started only to create debt--he thought. :After the war he was incarcerated outdoors in an open cage (the infamous "gorilla cage") at Pisa for twenty-five days, then for medical reasons (he considered himself broken by his time in the cage) in a tent. During the six months spent at Pisa living with the American GIs he worked on his translation of Confucius and wrote the Pisan Cantos. :"The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent/ shoulders" they begin, written on scraps of paper and using a typewriter in the medical tent after-hours. For books, Pound had the Chinese of Confucius, possibly James Legge's translation too, a Chinese dictionary, all of which he pocketed before the MPs took him away, an anthology of verse he found at the latrine, & a standard military issue Bible. The setting of these Cantos is as much Pound's memory, specifically of London, as the Italian landscape, and the collapse of Fascist Italy. :He was transferred to the US and tried for treason, found insane and subsequently imprisoned in a mental institution in Washington, D.C. (St. Elizabeth's Hospital) for 12 years. :Distinguished and recognized writers, in spite of Pound's politics, awarded him the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award for the Pisan Cantos. :Repeated appeals from writers earned him release from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to Italy, settling in Venice, where he was to complete his life. :In terms of his views on translation, the back cover of Pound's Confucius offers, "Pound never wanted to be a literal translator. What he could do, as no other could, is to identify the essence, pick out 'what matters now,' and phrase it so pungently, so beautifully, that it will stick in the head and start new thinking." :The 800-odd paged Cantos, which Pound described as "a poem including history", was his major work. The two line haiku-like In a Station of the Metro is well known and frequently anthologized. :Allen Ginsberg said, "He was the poet of the age." after the news came that Pound had died. :In addition to his poetry, Pound would be remembered as a great advocate for poets, the classics, the arts; in fact, as he viewed it, he was pushing for a new civilization. He tirelessly promoted artists he thought were creating innovative, good work. Upon seeing Robert Frost's first book and recognizing his talent, he took up Frost in England and quickly became an informal advocate. He was instrumental or absolutely vital in getting James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot published. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was heavily pared by Pound, which led Eliot to dedicate the poem to him, "the better craftsman" (in Italian, which were Dante's words.) Pound wrote extensively on the arts, including a book-length "Guide to Kulchur", and "ABC of Reading". Charles Olson, one of many directly influenced by "Old Ez", expressed at Berkeley in 1965, his thought that Pound had freed the languages of the world. :"The thought of what America would be like/ If the classics had a wide circulation/ Ah, well, it troubles my sleep." :"No man ever knows enough about any art." (Guide to Kulchur) == Article too reverent == I'm sorry, but this article is far too reverent. Pound's reputation as a poet is very much open to question, and the article should reflect that. There were numerous qualifications in the earlier versions that seem to have been systematically removed. Things I have a problem with: - why include the Kenner quote at all? -"he convinced his mentor to adopt a more direct way of writing, helping to bring about Yeats' mature style." This interpretation of Yeat's development has been in question for thirty years now, since Harold Bloom's study. ***But mss and typescripts of Yeats poems with Pound's (accepted) suggestions exist. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"His translations of Japanese Noh plays influenced Yeats' writing" - Pound didn't translate from Japanese; he didn't know Japanese, and the only influence on Yeats was the idea of Noh drama rather than any actual texts ***Pounds workings of Noh plays from Felonosa's notes were well known to Yeats. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -for that matter, why have the references to Pound's exaggeration of his translation skills been removed? Is there some reason that people looking up information on Pound should not be told that he didn't know Chinese or Japanese? -"Imagism and Vorticism. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce" - neither of those movements had anything to do with Joyce ***Joyce was in the Imigast anthology. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"can be seen as perhaps the central events in the birth of English-language modernism." or perhaps not **** Hence the perhaps. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward." I don't find this to be a NPOV statement; some of us - a lot of us - think The Cantos were a complete wrong turn that went nowhere. ***Clearly refers to Pound's way forward. User:Filiocht 12:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) -"Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions." somehow it has to be noted that many do not consider his efforts successful -"He also translated and championed Greek and Latin classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education was in decline." Pound did not do that much classical translation, and I don't think he's ever been considered particularly important in keeping classical learning going. User:66.190.242.110 4:12, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC) Why not create a user account and add what you feel you want added? User:Filiocht == Facism and Anti-Semitism == I could not source the statement that Ezra Pound's anti-semitic leanings had their genesis at the University of Idaho. According to the University of Idaho library, though he was a fixture within its library, his tastes in reading ran more to the left and radicalism than towards facism. I removed the statement. Can someone source it correctly? :Most scholars agree that Pound's anti-semitism dates from the 1930s, and almost everybody misses the fact that there is more anti-Christian and anti-Buddhist sentiment in his writings than anti-Jewish. While not at all wishing to deny that Pound was, for a long period of time, clearly anti-semitic, this article seems to be overly concerned with this aspect of his life, to the detriment of any serious discussion of the important role he played in 20th C English-language poetry. Now that I have finished working on The Cantos, I hope to do some work here, meanwhile I absolutely agree that theis statement should be removed until a decent attribution is given. User:Filiocht 08:57, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)
Ezra Pound
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