Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
expatriateAn expatriate is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing or legal residence...
poetPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
,
criticThe word critic comes from the Greek , "able to discern", which in turn derives from the word , meaning a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, value judgment, interpretation, or observation...
and
intellectualAn intellectual is a person who uses his or her intelligence and analytical thinking, either in a professional or a personal capacity.-Terminology and endeavours:...
who was a major figure of the
ModernistModernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1930 in the tradition of modernist literature; the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates...
movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. The critic
Hugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
said of Pound upon meeting him: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."
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
Robert FrostRobert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
,
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
,
Marianne MooreMarianne Moore was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of construction engineer and...
, H. D.,
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, and especially
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
. Pound also had a profound influence on the Irish writers
W. B. YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
and
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
.
His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promotion of
ImagismImagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical
ChineseChinese poetry is the most highly regarded literary genre in China. Traditionally, it is divided into shi , ci and qu . There is also a kind of prose-poem called fu . During the modern period, there also has developed free verse in Western style...
and
Japanese poetryJapanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry when it was at its peak in the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of...
—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and forgoing 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." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled
The CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
.
Early life
Pound was born in
HaileyHailey is a city in and the county seat of Blaine County, in the Wood River Valley of the central part of the U.S. state of Idaho. The population was 6,200 at the 2000 census. Hailey is the site of Friedman Memorial Airport , the airport for the resort area of Sun Valley/Ketchum, 12 miles north. ...
,
Idaho TerritoryThe Territory of Idaho was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 4, 1863, until July 3, 1890, when the final extent of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Idaho.-1860s:...
, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the
Lieutenant Governor of WisconsinThe Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin is the first person in the order of succession of Wisconsin's executive branch, thus serving as governor in the event of the death, resignation, removal, impeachment, absence from the state, or incapacity due to illness of the Governor of Wisconsin...
,
Thaddeus C. PoundThaddeus Coleman Pound was a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly and the Wisconsin State Senate. Pound was Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin 1870 - 1872...
; his mother was said to be related to the poet
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American educator and poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline"...
. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. In 1901 at the age of 15, he entered the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
, but after studying there for two years transferred to
Hamilton CollegeHamilton College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in Clinton, New York. The college is known for its emphasis on writing and speaking...
, where he received his
Ph.B.Bachelor of Philosophy is the title of an academic degree. The degree usually involves considerable research, either through a thesis or supervised research projects...
in 1905. He then returned to Penn, completing an M.A. in
RomanceThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
philologyPhilology considers both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies.Classical philology is the philology of the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages...
in 1906.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
and
H.D.H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
(Hilda Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a short time. Afterward, Pound taught at
Wabash CollegeWabash College is a small, private, liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Along with Hampden-Sydney College and Morehouse College, Wabash is one of only three remaining mainstream all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States....
in
Crawfordsville, IndianaCrawfordsville is a city in Montgomery County, Indiana, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city had a population of 15,243. The city is the county seat of Montgomery County....
, but when he allowed a stranded actress to spend the night in his room, the resulting scandal caused him to leave his teaching post after only four months, "all accusations", he later claimed, "having been ultimately refuted except that of being 'the
Latin QuarterLatin Quarter is a part of the 5th arrondissement in Paris.Latin Quarter may also refer to:* Latin Quarter , a British pop/rock band*Latin Quarter, Aarhus, part of Midtbyen, Aarhus C, Denmark...
type'". He had been taken to
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
by relatives in 1898 and again to Europe and
MoroccoMorocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country located in North Africa with a population of nearly 32 million and an area just under . Its capital is Rabat, and its largest city is Casablanca. Morocco has a coast on the Atlantic Ocean that reaches past the Strait of Gibraltar into the...
in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, living first in Venice but eventually settling in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
after spending a brief stint working as a tour guide in
GibraltarGibraltar is a self-governing British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe at the entrance of the Mediterranean overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. The territory covers and shares a land border with Spain to the north...
. Pound self-published
A Lume Spento, his first published collection of short poems, while living in Venice.
London
Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th-century poets, medieval
RomanceAs a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about the marvelous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight errant,...
literature (especially Provençal) and the neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy of that period. After he moved to London, the influence of
Ford Madox FordFord Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
and
T. E. HulmeThomas Ernest Hulme was an English writer who, during his informal tenure from 1909 as critic for The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, had a notable influence upon modernism.-Early life:...
encouraged him to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms and begin to remake himself as a poet. Pound believed that
William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. He eventually became Yeats's secretary, and soon became mildly interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During 1914 and 1915 Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in
SussexSussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is a historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
, England, studying
JapaneseJapanese literature spans a period of almost two millennia. Early works were heavily influenced by cultural contact with China and Chinese literature, often written in Classical Chinese. Indian literature also had an influence through the diffusion of Buddhism in Japan...
, especially
Noh, or is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing both the male and female roles. The repertoire is normally limited to a specific set of historical plays...
plays. They paid particular attention to the works of
Ernest FenollosaErnest Francisco Fenollosa was a Catalan American professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University...
, an American professor in Japan whose work on Chinese characters fascinated Pound. Eventually, Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the
Ideogrammic MethodThe Ideogrammic Method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa....
. On April 20, 1914, Pound married
Dorothy ShakespearDorothy Shakespear was an English artist, the daughter of Olivia Shakespear and the wife of the poet Ezra Pound....
, an artist and daughter of the novelist Olivia Shakespear, a former lover of Yeats.
In the years before the World War I, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of
ImagismImagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
, and coined the name of the movement Vorticism, which was led by
Wyndham LewisPercy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
, of whom Pound was also a friend. Pound contributed to Lewis' short-lived
literary magazineA literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
BLAST whose two numbers appeared in 1914 and 1915. These two movements, Imagism and Vorticism, can be seen as central events in the birth of English-language modernism. They helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
, Lewis,
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
,
H.D.H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
,
Jacob EpsteinSir Jacob Epstein was an American-born British sculptor who worked chiefly in the UK, where he pioneered modern sculpture, often producing controversial works that challenged taboos concerning what public artworks appropriately depict...
,
Richard AldingtonRichard Aldington born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...
,
Marianne MooreMarianne Moore was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of construction engineer and...
,
Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath. As a poet, novelist, musician, and playwright, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
,
Robert FrostRobert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
,
Rebecca WestCicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...
and
Henri Gaudier-BrzeskaHenri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French sculptor who developed a rough hewn, primitive style of direct carving....
. Later, Pound also edited his friend
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
's
The Waste LandThe Waste Land[A] is a 434 line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922...
, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published
CathayCathay is the Anglicized version of "Catai" and an alternative name for China in English. It originates from the word Khitan, the name of a nomadic people who founded the Liao Dynasty which ruled much of Northern China from 907 to 1125, and who had a state of their own centered around today's...
, a small volume of poems that he described as "For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po), from the notes of the late
Ernest FenollosaErnest Francisco Fenollosa was a Catalan American professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University...
, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga". The volume includes works such as
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter and
A Ballad of the Mulberry Road. Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and
stanzaIn poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
ic patterns, Pound offered readers
free verseFree verse - also known as vers libre - is a term describing various styles of poetry that are written without using a strict rhyme scheme, but still recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole.-Types:Philip...
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 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, though many critics argue that the fidelity of
Cathay to the original Chinese is beside the point.
Hugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, in a chapter "The Invention of China" from
The Pound Era contends that
Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.
The first World War had a profound effect on many writers and poets of that period. The Great 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 MauberleyHugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem by Ezra Pound. It has been regarded as a turning point in Pound's career , and its completion was swiftly followed by his departure from England. The name "Selwyn" might have been an homage to Rhymers' Club member Selwyn Image. The name and personality of the...
(1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career,
The CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
, 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 revolutionizing the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as
Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
,
Tristan TzaraTristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist...
,
Fernand LégerJoseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker.-Biography:Léger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an...
and others of the
DadaDada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and
SurrealistSurrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
movements. He was also good friends with
Basil BuntingBasil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
and
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, whom Pound asked to teach him to box. (Hemingway would later write, in
A Moveable FeastA Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s...
: "I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook.") He continued working on
The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence", which introduced one of the major personas of the poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations with
politicsPolitics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions...
and
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
. During this time, he also wrote critical prose and translations and composed two complete
operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
s (with help from
George AntheilGeorge Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with its cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices...
) and several pieces for solo
violinThe violin is a bowed string instrument with four strings usually tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest and highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which also includes the viola and cello....
. In 1922 he met and became involved with
Olga RudgeOlga Rudge was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-term mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary....
, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy
ménage à troisMénage à trois is the French term describing a domestic arrangement in which three people having sexual relations occupy the same household.-Term:...
which was to last until the end of the poet's life.
Italy
On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to
RapalloRapallo is a municipality in the province of Genoa, in Liguria, northern Italy. As of 2007 it counts approximately 34,000 inhabitants, it is part of the Tigullio Gulf and is located in between Portofino and Chiavari....
, Italy. Near neighbours were
Max BeerbohmSir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist.-Early life:Born in London, England at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was the last of several children of a Lithuanian-born grain merchant, Julius Ewald Edward Beerbohm . His mother was Eliza...
and his wife
Florence KahnFlorence Kahn was a Jewish American actress and the first wife of caricaturist and parodist Sir Max Beerbohm.-Acting career:...
. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to
SicilySicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is an autonomous region of Italy. Several much smaller islands surrounding it are considered to be part of Sicily....
, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor
Heinz HenghesHeinz Henghes was a British sculptor.Born Gustav Heinrich Clusmann in Hamburg at the age of 17 Henghes ran away from home to go to the United States. In New York City he met a number of artists and writers, and was influenced by Isamu Noguchi...
came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet
James LaughlinJames Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers.- Biography :He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea 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 organized 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
VivaldiAntonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed il Prete Rosso , was a baroque composer and Venetian priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist, born and raised in the Republic of Venice...
, who had been neglected since his death. Pound also became alarmed at the importation taxes levied by the United States on what Pound believed to be works of art. In addition to lobbying the US Customs and the
House of RepresentativesThe United States House of Representatives, commonly referred to as the "House," is the lower house of the bicameral United States Congress, the upper house being the United States Senate. The composition and powers of the House and the Senate are established in Article One of the Constitution...
, Pound wrote an essay in 1928 entitled "Article 211", where he related a trial to the recent decision to categorise the
Nassak DiamondThe Nassak Diamond is a large, diamond that originated as a larger diamond in the 15th century in India...
as a work of art, and therefore let it into the United States without payment of an import duty.
In 1933, he had a personal audience with Italy's prime minister
Benito MussoliniBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini,
KSMOM GCTE was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. He became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began using the title Il Duce by...
and presented him with a draft of XXX Cantos. Mussolini's response was: "How amusing."
Later, Pound would be asked to make radio broadcasts from Rome. In a radio broadcast in June 1942 he would say "Every man of common sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man of common sense prefers
FascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
to
CommunismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
, from the moment that he learns a few concrete facts about both of them."
In 1939, on the eve of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Pound made his first trip back home to the U.S. in many years. He considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. Pound also had personal reasons for staying in Italy. His elderly parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in poor health and would have difficulty making the trip back to America even under peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his mistress
Olga RudgeOlga Rudge was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-term mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary....
: Mary 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, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941 after
Pearl HarborThe attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Japanese navy against the United States' naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941 , later resulting in the United...
. He made several radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his scant political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. When Pound spoke on Italian radio, he gave a series of talks on political and cultural matters, art and patronage and economic theories. Pound believed that economics was the core issue for the cause of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Specifically, his talks were largely about
usuryUsury originally meant the charging of interest on loans. This would have included charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change. After countries legislated to limit the rate of interest on loans, usury came to mean the interest above the lawful rate...
and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of
central bankA central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is a banking institution granted the exclusive privilege to a lend a government its currency...
s, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound was not the first prominent American to make this assertion; for example New York City Mayor John Hylan had publicly said the same thing back in 1922 when he said "these international bankers control the majority of the magazines and newspapers in this country." Pound believed that
economic freedomEconomic freedom is a term used in economic research and policy debates. As with freedom generally, there are various definitions, but no universally accepted concept of economic freedom...
was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the war.
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard Pound's radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable, though obviously his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of pamphlets) were read in Italy. However, according to his biographer
Humphrey CarpenterHumphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, author, and radio broadcaster.-Biography:...
, the broadcasts were "a masterly performance".. Carpenter wrote "Certainly there were Americans who, in 1941, would have agreed with virtually every word Ezra said at the microphone about the United States Government, the European conflict, and the power of the Jews.". The broadcasts were monitored by the
Foreign Broadcast Monitoring ServiceForeign Broadcast Information Service is an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitors, translates, and disseminates within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the...
of the United States government, and transcripts, now stored in the
Library of CongressThe Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress and is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books. The head...
, were made of them. Pound was indicted for treason by the United States government in 1943.
After Allied forces had landed in Sicily and began to overrun the southern part of Italy in July, 1943, Mussolini was dismissed by King Victor Emmanuel III and interned at the mountain resort of Gran Sasso. Two months later, Mussolini was freed by German troops and relocated to the north, where a
Fascist RepublicThe Italian Social Republic was a puppet state of Nazi Germany led by the "Duce of the Nation" and "Minister of Foreign Affairs" Benito Mussolini. The RSI exercised official sovereignty in northern Italy but was largely dependent on the Wehrmacht to maintain control...
was established.
Pound also moved northwards On May 3, 1945, as Mussolini's puppet regime tumbled, Pound was arrested by partisans and taken (according to
Hugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
) "to their HQ in
ChiavariChiavari is a town on the Italian Riviera in the Province of Genoa, region of Liguria. It is situated near the mouth of the Entella River, in the center of a fertile plain surrounded by mountains except on the southwest, where it comes down to the Mediterranean Sea...
, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." At his request, he was then brought to the U.S. command in
LavagnaLavagna is a fishing port city of c. 13,000 inhabitants in the curving stretch of the Italian Riviera di Levante called the gulf of Tigullio, in the province of Genoa in Liguria. The borgo of Lavagna was an important Ligurian cultural center in the Middle Ages...
, whence he was driven to the C.I.C. in
GenoaGenoa is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria. The city has a population of about 610,000 and the urban area has a population of about 900,000...
. On May 24 he was transferred from Genoa to a
United States ArmyThe United States Army is the branch of the United States Military responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military and is one of seven uniformed services...
detention camp north of
PisaPisa is a city in Tuscany, central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the Arno River on the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...
. He spent 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent, and appears to have suffered a
nervous breakdownMental breakdown is a non-medical term used to describe an acute, time-limited disorder that presents primarily with features of depression or anxiety.-Definition:...
. He 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. The
Pisan CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
won the first
Bollingen PrizeThe Bollingen Prize, which is presently awarded every two years by Beinecke Library of Yale University, is a prestigious literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.-Inception and controversy:The...
from the Library of Congress in 1949.
St. Elizabeths
After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of
treasonIn law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of disloyalty to one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife...
. The charges covered only his activities during the time when the
Kingdom of ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's
Salò RepublicThe Italian Social Republic was a puppet state of Nazi Germany led by the "Duce of the Nation" and "Minister of Foreign Affairs" Benito Mussolini. The RSI exercised official sovereignty in northern Italy but was largely dependent on the Wehrmacht to maintain control...
, evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found incompetent to face trial by a special federal jury and sent to
St. Elizabeths HospitalSt. Elizabeths [sic] Hospital, located in Washington, D.C., was the first large-scale, federally-run psychiatric hospital in the United States. It is known colloquially as "St. E's"....
in
Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790...
, where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do appear to be those of a sane person.
E. Fuller TorreyEdwin Fuller Torrey, M.D. , is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center , a nonprofit organization with the goals of eliminating legal and clinical obstacles to the...
believed that Pound was given special treatment by colluding authorities, specifically Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote books, received visits from literary figures and enjoyed
conjugalA conjugal visit is a scheduled extended visit during which an inmate of a prison is permitted to spend several hours or days in private, usually with a legal spouse...
relations with his wife. The reliability of Torrey's allegations has been questioned; other scholars have presented Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient, without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound continued working on
The CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
as well as translating the
Confucian classicsThe Four Books of Confucianism , are Chinese classic texts that Zhu Xi selected, in the Song dynasty, as an introduction to Confucianism: the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects of Confucius, and the Mencius...
.
Pound was frequently visited by his protegé, a Library of Congress researcher named
Eustace MullinsEustace Mullins is an American political writer, author, biographer. As of 2005, Eustace Mullins is a member of the Southeast Bureau editorial staff of Willis Carto's American Free Press...
. Pound commissioned Mullins to write a book about the history of the Federal Reserve and to tell it like a detective story. Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the
Bank of EnglandThe Bank of England is, despite its name, the central bank of the whole of the United Kingdom and is the model on which most modern, large central banks have been based. It was established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and to this day it still acts as the banker for the UK...
were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels (the national debt indeed rose astronomically because of the wars). The book,
Secrets Of The Federal Reserve, charges that bankers hide behind the screen of the central banks and pull political strings to drive countries into the war, creating immense profits for themselves as the principal beneficiaries of wartime debt. Pound advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He favored government issued
currencyIn economics, the term currency can refer either to a particular currency, for example the US dollar, or to the coins and banknotes of a particular currency, which comprise the physical aspects of a nation's money supply...
with no interest to pay, preventing the need for an
income taxAn income tax is a tax levied on the income of individuals or business . Various income tax systems exist, with varying degrees of tax incidence. Income taxation can be progressive, proportional, or regressive. When the tax is levied on the income of companies, it is often called a corporate tax,...
and national debt, much like the system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764. Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of
Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States , the principal author of the Declaration of Independence , and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States...
, as well as with
Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, soldier, and diplomat...
's
Colonial ScripColonial scrip was paper fiat money as opposed to specie issued by the colonies of the United States of America in the pre-revolution era, up until 1775...
.
Pound was also befriended at St. Elizabeths by
Hugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, whose
The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a reassessment of Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the
Pound Newsletter, which eventually led to the publication of the first guide to
The CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
,
Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound had many friends and admirers among his fellow poets, like
Elizabeth BishopElizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artist's retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory.-Early years:Elizabeth Bishop was born in...
, who recorded her response to Pound's situation in the poem "
Visits to St. Elizabeth'sVisits to St Elizabeth's is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop which is modelled on the English nursery rhyme This is the house that Jack built. The poem refers to the confinement of Ezra Pound to St. Elizabeths Hospital. The nursery rhyme style gives an unusual effect to the strange or unsettling...
", and
Robert LowellRobert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement...
, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. The artist
Sheri MartinelliSheri Martinelli, was an American painter, muse and poet.-Life:Martinelli was born Shirley Burns Brennan in Philadelphia in 1918. Of Irish ancestry, she was the eldest of four children and began using the name Sherry by the time she was a teenager. Later told that her first name had the wrong...
, meanwhile, is believed to have inspired the love poetry in Cantos XC–XCV. Both
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
and
Louis ZukofskyLouis Zukofsky was one of the most important second-generation American modernist poets. He was co-founder and primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and was to be an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Early life and writings:He was born in...
were among Pound's visitors, as was
Guy DavenportGuy Mattison Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.-Life:...
, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as
Cities on Hills in 1983).
Pound's other visitors included the Colonial French nonfigurative painter
René LaubiesRené Laubies was a French painter.He is associated to Tachisme and Art Informel but linked in particular to Nuagisme or the "cloudist" group of painters.-External links:*Cloutier, Guy. N.d. Untitled document. ....
, the first translator of the work of Pound into French (
Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound, Paris: P.J. Oswald, 1958. 77 pages). In his
Portraits et Aphorismes (2001) Laubies writes that he did not remember having any "difficulties returning to visit Pound at the Asylum of St. Elisabeths." He asked Pound whether the surroundings obstructed him. "Not at all" Pound stated, "they are the only acceptable Americans." When Laubies told Pound that he was born in Saigon: "Ah, that's why! Only Europeans with a master key to the
Suez CanalThe Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened on November 1869, it allows water transportation between Europe and Asia without navigating around Africa...
are worth something...."
Charles OlsonCharles Olson , was an important 2nd generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San...
was a frequent visitor (Pound wrote in a note to his attorney that "Olson saved my life" by providing sane conversation). Olson eventually became disgusted with Pound's antisemitic statements and stopped his visits. Sinologist and budding Pound scholar
Achilles FangAchilles Chih-t'ung Fang was a legendary sinologist and comparatist, the relative slenderness of whose intellectual posterity did not diminish the great esteem in which he was held by those who knew him in life; Marianne Moore called him "the word wizard." His correspondence with Ezra Pound...
became an important correspondent on Chinese subjects, especially Confucius, during these years; he and Pound were to exchange 214 letters.
Rudd Fleming, a professor at the
University of MarylandThe University of Maryland, College Park is a public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Founded in 1856, the University of Maryland is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland...
, visited Pound often. They collaborated on a translation of
Sophocles' ElectraElectra or Elektra is a Greek tragic play by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes and the Oedipus at Colonus lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career.Set in the city of Argos a few years after the...
, which was published by
Princeton University PressThe Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large....
in 1989. Fleming stated, when asked about Pound's antisemitism, that Pound considered it a mistake. A statement from Pound's foreword to a collection of his prose writings (written on July 4, 1972) would seem to support Fleming's assertion: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE."
Pound also declared in 1967, "The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly
Robert FrostRobert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
and
Archibald MacLeishArchibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernist school of poetry. He has received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
. He was still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others. Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum." Subsequently he returned to Italy (first to Castle Brunnenburg near Meran, in Bolzano-Bozen, then later to
RapalloRapallo is a municipality in the province of Genoa, in Liguria, northern Italy. As of 2007 it counts approximately 34,000 inhabitants, it is part of the Tigullio Gulf and is located in between Portofino and Chiavari....
and
VeniceVenice is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, a population of 271,367 . Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area . The city historically was an independent nation...
). He remained in Italy until his death in 1972.
Death
On his release, Pound returned to Italy continuing work on
The Cantos. In 1972, two days after his 87th birthday, Pound died in
VeniceVenice is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, a population of 271,367 . Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area . The city historically was an independent nation...
, where he is buried.
Pound and music
Pound's
The CantosThe Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
contains music and bears a title that could be translated as
The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the
motz et sons of
troubadourA troubadour was a composer and performer of Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
poetry where, as
musicologistMusicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture. In the intermediate sense, it includes all relevant cultures and a range of musical forms, styles, genres and...
John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest
symbiosisThe term symbosis commonly describes close and often long-term interactions between different biological species...
, 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." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 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
CatullusGaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet of the 1st century BC. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art. Catullus invented the "angry love poem."-Biography:...
and
François VillonFrançois Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." 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
impressionisticImpressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...
music of
Claude DebussyAchille-Claude Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
. 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
DanteDANTE is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various National Research and Education Networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
's sestina, "Al poco giorno", for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas:
Le Testament, a setting of
François VillonFrançois Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and
Cavalcanti, a setting of 11 poems by
Guido CavalcantiGuido Cavalcanti was a Florentine poet, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante. His poems in their original Italian are available on Wikisource .- Historical Background :...
(c. 1250–1300). Pound began composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, a 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 his years in Paris (1921–1924), Pound formed close friendships with the American pianist and composer
George AntheilGeorge Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with its cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices...
, 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 FrenchOld French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 900 to 1300...
for
Le Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more elaborate than
StravinskyIgor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of...
's benchmarks of the period,
Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) and
L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere", one of the opera's key
ariaAn aria in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. The term is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment...
s, at a
tempoIn musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece. It is a crucial element of composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece.-Measuring tempo:...
of quarter note = M.M. 88, moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25–28), making it difficult for performers to hear the current
barIn musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined as a given number of beats of a given duration. The word measure is heard more frequently in the U.S., while bar is used in other English-speaking countries, although musicians generally understand both usages...
of music and anticipate the upcoming bar. 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; no comfort zone for singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of
troubadourA troubadour was a composer and performer of Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting
dissonanceDissonance has several meanings, all related to conflict or incongruity:*Consonance and dissonance in music are properties of an interval or chord*Cognitive dissonance is a state of mental conflict....
in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm carries the emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls for human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs, and counter-rhythms lurch against each other—an offense to courtly etiquette. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another melody", as Pound puts it, the work spawns a
polyphonyIn music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of
harmonyIn music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches, or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
. 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 ThomsonVirgil Thomson was an American composer and critic from Kansas City, Missouri. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
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 CampionThomas Campion, was an English composer, poet and physician.-Biography:Campion was born in London and studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. He later entered Gray's Inn to study law in 1586. However, he left in 1595 without having been called to the bar...
. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory."
Robert Hughes has remarked that where
Le Testament explores a
WebernesqueAnton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
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 cantoBel canto , along with a number of similar constructions , is an Italian opera term with several possible different meanings that is subject to a wide array of interpretations.The earliest usage of the term bel canto emerged in late 17th-century Italy to refer to the Italian model of singing...
, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to
VerdiGiuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
and a musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time his relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky.
Cavalcanti demands attention to its varying
cadenceCadence may refer to:In music:*Cadence , a melodic configuration or series of chords marking the end of a phrase, section, or piece of music*Cadenza, a long, unaccompanied, freely played, and sometimes improvised solo passage in a concerto...
s, to a recurring
leitmotifA leitmotif is a recurring musical theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea...
, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established laws of composition, history,
physiologyPhysiology is the science of the functioning of living systems. It is a subcategory of biology...
, reason, and love.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME", distinguishes his 20th century
medievalismMedievalism is the system of belief and practice characteristic of the middle ages or devotion to elements of that period, which has been expressed in areas such as architecture, literature, music, art, philosophy, scholarship, and various vehicles of popular culture...
from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently biased for complex,
asymmetricAsymmetry is the absence of, or a violation of, a symmetry.-In organisms:Due to how cells divide in organisms, asymmetry in organisms is fairly usual in at least one dimension, with biological symmetry also being common in at least one dimension....
, and fast tempi; it thrives on innovation and surprise. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches; it can accommodate older styles of music with their
symmetrySymmetry generally conveys two primary meanings. The first is an imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically pleasing proportionality and balance; such that it reflects beauty or perfection...
, repetition, and more uniform tempi, as well as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical micro-metrical divisions of rhythm created for
Le Testament. Pound was a friend of
Igor StravinskyIgor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of...
.
Legacy
Because of his political views, his support of Mussolini, his opposition to central banking, and his anti-Semitism, Pound acquired many enemies throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Historians and scholars generally agree, however, that he played a vital role in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. The location of Pound—as opposed to other writers such as
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
—at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic
Hugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement
The Pound Era. The critic
Marjorie PerloffMarjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
has also insisted upon Pound's centrality to numerous traditions of 'experimental' poetry in the 20th century. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ
free verseFree verse - also known as vers libre - is a term describing various styles of poetry that are written without using a strict rhyme scheme, but still recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole.-Types:Philip...
in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the
ObjectivistsThe Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
.
The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
and other
BeatThe Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired...
poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of
parataxisParataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions...
which had a major influence on his poetry. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century has been considered by some to be in his debt.
As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped shape the careers of some of the 20th century's most influential writers including W. B. Yeats,
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
,
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
,
Wyndham LewisPercy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
,
Robert FrostRobert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
,
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
,
H.D.H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
,
Marianne MooreMarianne Moore was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of construction engineer and...
,
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
,
D. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
,
Louis ZukofskyLouis Zukofsky was one of the most important second-generation American modernist poets. He was co-founder and primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and was to be an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Early life and writings:He was born in...
,
Basil BuntingBasil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
,
George OppenGeorge Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
, and
Charles OlsonCharles Olson , was an important 2nd generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San...
. Immediately before the
First World WarWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists, a term he coined. 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-BrzeskaHenri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French sculptor who developed a rough hewn, primitive style of direct carving....
and
Wyndham LewisPercy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
.
As a translator, Pound did much to introduce
ProvençalOccitan , known also as Lenga d'òc in Occitan or Langue d'oc in French is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, that is, Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco and in the Aran Valley of Spain...
and
ChineseChinese literature extends back thousands of years, from the earliest recorded dynastic court archives to the mature fictional novel that arose during the Ming Dynasty to entertain the masses of literate Chinese...
poetry to English-speaking audiences. For example, he helped popularize major poets such as
Guido CavalcantiGuido Cavalcanti was a Florentine poet, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante. His poems in their original Italian are available on Wikisource .- Historical Background :...
and
Du FuDu Fu was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.Along with Li Bai , he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations...
. He revived interest in the
ConfucianConfucius , lit. "Master Kong," was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher, whose teachings and philosophy have deeply influenced Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese thought and life....
classics and introduced the West to classical Japanese poetry and drama (the
Noh, or is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing both the male and female roles. The repertoire is normally limited to a specific set of historical plays...
theatre). He also translated and championed Greek,
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
and Anglo-Saxon classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education and knowledge of Anglo-Saxon 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
VenetianVenice is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, a population of 271,367 . Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area . The city historically was an independent nation...
composer
Antonio VivaldiAntonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed il Prete Rosso , was a baroque composer and Venetian priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist, born and raised in the Republic of Venice...
and to promote
early musicEarly music is commonly defined as European classical music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, sometimes also including the Baroque.-Revival:...
generally. He also helped the early career of
George AntheilGeorge Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with its cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices...
, and collaborated with him on various projects. Pound was also interested in
mysticismMysticism is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or...
and the
occultThe word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
, but biographers have only recently begun to document his work in those fields.
Selected works
Pound's works by year published (with years linked to the corresponding [year]-in-poetry article for poetry, [year]-in-literature article for other works; cities are location first editions published):
- 1908
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ezra Pound leaves America for Europe...
A Lume Spento, poems (Venice)
- 1908
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ezra Pound leaves America for Europe...
A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems (London).
- 1909
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Andrew Cecil Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry* Founding of the Poetry Recital Society...
Personae, poems (London)
- 1909
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Andrew Cecil Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry* Founding of the Poetry Recital Society...
Exultations, poems (London)
- 1910
— closing lines of Rudyard Kipling's If—, first published this year in Rewards and FairiesNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:...
Provenca, poems (Boston)
- 1910
The year 1910 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*April - Halley's comet reappears , and Mark Twain dies on April 21, 1910, the day following the comet's perihelion. In his biography, Twain had written, "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It's coming again...
The Spirit of Romance, essays (London)
- 1911
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Britain establishes six copyright libraries to which copies of all books published in the country must be sent: Bodleian Library ; British Library ; National Library of Scotland ; National Library of...
Canzoni, poems (London)
- 1912
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore takes a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they impress William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others...
Ripostes, poems (London)
- 1912
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore takes a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they impress William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others...
The Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations, (London)
- 1915
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poet Sergei Yesenin , published his first book of poems titled "Radumitsa."...
Cathay, poems / translations
- 1916
The year 1816 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*John Keats composes the poem, Sleep and Poetry, while staying at the house of his friend, Leigh Hunt.-New books:*Thomas Ashe - The Soldier of Fortune...
: Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London)
- 1916
The year 1916 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Journal of Negro History is founded by Carter Godwin Woodson, the father of "Black History" and "Negro History Week."...
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
The year 1916 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Journal of Negro History is founded by Carter Godwin Woodson, the father of "Black History" and "Negro History Week."...
"Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.
- 1916
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* March – Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, who wrote under the pen name "Guillaume Apollinaire", was wounded in the head by shell fragments while serving as a lieutenant in the infantry at...
"The Lake Isle", poem
- 1916
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* March – Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, who wrote under the pen name "Guillaume Apollinaire", was wounded in the head by shell fragments while serving as a lieutenant in the infantry at...
Lustra, poems.
- 1917
The year 1917 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* In January, Francis Picabia produces the first issue of the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona....
Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations
- 1918
The year 1918 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The 2nd annual Pulitzer Prizes are awarded.* Author Hall Caine made a KBE.*Robert Graves marries Nancy Nicholson...
: Pavannes and Divisions, prose (New York)
- 1919
— From A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two paintings by E. E...
Quia Pauper Amavi, poems (London)
- 1918
The year 1918 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The 2nd annual Pulitzer Prizes are awarded.* Author Hall Caine made a KBE.*Robert Graves marries Nancy Nicholson...
Pavannes and Divisions, essays
- 1919
— From A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two paintings by E. E...
The Fourth Canto, poems
- 1920
— Opening and closing lines of The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
Umbra, poems and translations (London)
- 1920
— Opening and closing lines of The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
Hugh Selwyn MauberleyHugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem by Ezra Pound. It has been regarded as a turning point in Pound's career , and its completion was swiftly followed by his departure from England. The name "Selwyn" might have been an homage to Rhymers' Club member Selwyn Image. The name and personality of the...
, poems (London)
- 1921
— Wilfred Owen, concluding lines of Dulce et Decorum Est, published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
Poems, 1918–1921, poems (New York)
- 1922
The year 1922 in literature involved some significant events and new books.Under the current U.S. copyright law, all works published before January 1, 1923 with a proper copyright notice entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the date of the copyright...
The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations
- 1923
The year 1923 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in print....
Indiscretions, essays
- 1923
The year 1923 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in print....
Le Testament, one-act opera
- 1924
The year 1924 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Ford Madox Ford publishes the first book of a four-volume work titled Parade's End published between 1924 and 1928.-New books:*Michael Arlen - The Green Hat...
Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays (Paris)
- 1925
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems (Paris)
- 1926
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The remains of English war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in World War I at the age of 28 and originally buried in a mass grave, are re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St...
Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York)
- 1927
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-India in English:* Swami Ananda Acharya, Sara and other poems, Roros, Norway: Odegards Trykkeri 106 pages...
Exile, poems
- 1928
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky found OBERIU , an avant-garde grouping of Russian post-Futurist poets in the 1920s-1930s* American poets Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis...
A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, poems
- 1928
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky found OBERIU , an avant-garde grouping of Russian post-Futurist poets in the 1920s-1930s* American poets Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis...
Selected Poems, edited by T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
(London)
- 1928
The year 1928 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Ford Madox Ford publishes Last Post. It is the final book of a four-volume work titled Parade's End published between 1924 and 1928....
Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation
- 1930
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Frost Medal inaugurated by the Poetry Society of America* John Masefield becomes Poet Laureate...
A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems (New York)
- 1930
The year 1930 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*January 6 - The first literary character licensing agreement is signed by A. A. Milne, granting Stephen Slesinger U.S...
Imaginary Letters, essays
- 1931
The year 1931 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs premiers. It would later be adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein as Oklahoma!....
How to Read, essays
- 1933
The year 1933 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 17 - The magazine Newsweek is published for the first time.* James Joyce's Ulysses is allowed into United States.-New books:...
ABC of Economics, essays
- 1933
The year 1933 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 17 - The magazine Newsweek is published for the first time.* James Joyce's Ulysses is allowed into United States.-New books:...
Cavalcanti, three-act opera
- 1934
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems (New York)
- 1934
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems (London)
- 1934
The year 1934 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The first Flash Gordon comic strip is published.*Boris Pasternak and Korney Chukovsky are among those present at the first Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers....
ABC of Reading, essays
- 1935
The year 1935 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Penguin Books publishes the first "paperback" book.*W. H. Auden enters a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann.-New books:*Maxwell Anderson - Winterset...
Make It New, essays
- 1936
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* James Laughlin founds New Directions Publishers in New York, which published many modern poets for the first time;...
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
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Iowa Writers' Workshop founded by Paul Engle at the University of Iowa...
The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems (London)
- 1937
The year 1937 in literature involved some significant events and new books.- Events :*January 9 - The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale in the United States.*Thomas Quinn Curtiss meets Klaus Mann.- New books :...
Polite Essays, essays
- 1937
The year 1937 in literature involved some significant events and new books.- Events :*January 9 - The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale in the United States.*Thomas Quinn Curtiss meets Klaus Mann.- New books :...
Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation
- 1938
The year 1938 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The trilogy, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, is published containing his three novels The 42nd Parallel , 1919 , and The Big Money ....
Culture, essays
- 1939 What Is Money For?, essays
- 1940
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* English poet and writer Aldous Huxley is a screenwriter for the movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice...
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
- 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
- 1948
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Sometime this year, Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that...
The Pisan Cantos, poems (New York)
- 1950
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Charles Olson publishes his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should...
Seventy Cantos, poems
- 1951
The year 1951 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*E. E. Cummings and Rachel Carson are awarded Guggenheim Fellowships.*Flannery O'Connor is diagnosed with lupus....
Confucian analects, translator
- 1953
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and Harold L...
: The Translations of Ezra Pound, translations (London)
- 1955
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaum's flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith...
Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
- 1956
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath marry...
Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound, translation (London)
- 1959
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In the United States, "Those serious new Bohemians, the beatniks, occupied with reading their deliberately undisciplined, protesting verse in night clubs and hotel ballrooms, created more publicity...
Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
- 1968
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Belfast Group, a grouping of poets in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which was started in 1963 in poetry, lapsed in 1966 when founder Philip Hobsbaum left for Glasgow, is reconstituted this year by...
Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems
Selected posthumous works and editions
- 1975
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* With the 1974, fall of the dictatorship in Greece, poets, authors and intellectuals who had fled after the coup of 1967 returned, and this year many began publishing in that country.* Brick Books, a...
: Selected Poems, 1908-1959, poems (London)
- 1976
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two poems written in 1965 by Mao Zedong just before the Cultural Revolution, including "Two Birds: A Dialogue", are published on January 1-Works published in English:Listed by nation where the work...
: Collected Early Poems (New York)
- 1975
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* February 16 — Announcement that 300 poems by S.T...
: The Cantos (New York) ISBN 0-8112-1326-9
- 1997 Ezra Pound and Music, essays
- 1990
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Allen Ginsberg crowned "Majelis King" in Prague on May Day...
: Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York)
- 1992 A Walking Tour of Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours (New York) ISBN 0-8112-1223-8
- 2002
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* March 16: Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested and jailed poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired a newspaper editor following the publication of Musalam's poem The Corrupt on Earth that criticized the...
Canti postumi, poems ISBN 88-04-51031-5
- 2003 Ego scriptor cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, operas/music
- 2003 Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations (Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published nearly 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to...
, 2003) ISBN 978-1-931082-41-9
- 2005 Early Writings (New York) ISBN 0-14-218913-0
See also
- Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
- The European
The European was a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published between 1953-1959. During this tenure, it was edited by Diana Mosley. The magazine was published by 'Euphorion Books', a publishing company formed by Mosley and her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley.-Overview:The...
- Magazine edited by Diana Mosley to which Pound contributed.
Further reading
- Bacigalupo, Massimo (1980). The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Bischoff, Volker (1991). Ezra Pound and Criticism 1905–1985: A Chronicle Listing of Publications in English. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation
The National Poetry Foundation is a book publisher founded in 1971 by Carroll F. Terrell who built its reputation with Burton Hatlen at the University of Maine in Orono. Today it publishes poetry by individual authors as well as both journals and scholarship devoted to Ezra Pound and poets in the...
- Bush, Ronald. "Art Versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos" in Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95.
- Carpenter, Humphrey
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, author, and radio broadcaster.-Biography:...
(1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Fisher, Margaret (2002). Ezra Pound's Radio Operas. Boston: The MIT Press.
- Fisher, Margaret (2005). The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera: Collis O Heliconi; settings of poems by Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet of the 1st century BC. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art. Catullus invented the "angry love poem."-Biography:...
and SapphoSappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the canonical list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
- Hughes, Robert (2004). Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
- Hughes, Robert and Fisher, Margaret(2003). Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
- Ingman, Michael (1999). "Pound and Music" in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Kenner, Hugh
William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
(1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Laubies, René
René Laubies was a French painter.He is associated to Tachisme and Art Informel but linked in particular to Nuagisme or the "cloudist" group of painters.-External links:*Cloutier, Guy. N.d. Untitled document. ....
(1958). Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound; traduction de René Laubies. Paris: P. J. Oswald, 77 pages.
- Longenbach, James (1991). Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Moody, A. David (2007). Ezra Pound: Poet I: The Young Genius 1885-1920. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-921557-X
- Oderman, Kevin (1986). Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.
- Perelman, Bob
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. He is often associated with the Language School group of poets. Perelman is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.-Life and Work:...
(1994). The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Pantano, Antonio (2009). Ezra Pound e la Repubblica Sociale Italiana Roma: Pagine.
- Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Stock, Noel (1970). Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
- Stevens, John (1986). Words and Music in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Surette, Leon (1994). The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. McGill-Queen's University Press.
- Thomson, Virgil (1966). Virgil Thomson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Hilary Clarke, The Fictional Encyclopaedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers (1990) Taylor & Francis.
External links
- Yale College Lecture on Ezra Pound audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
- Articles and analysis of Pound's works at Literary Encyclopedia
- Pound's Grave
- Pound at Modern American Poetry
- Pound at EPC
- Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character, by T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
- The Music of Ezra Pound
- A Pound biography at Kobe University
- Marjorie Perloff's essay on 'The Pisan Cantos' and Pound's translations
- Ezra Pound Speaking -- the text of his radio speeches; the text of "An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States", "Jefferson and/or Mussolini", "America, Roosevelt and the causes of the present war"
- The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound and Robert Theobald
- Ezra Pound collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections
Audio recordings
Readings of Ezra Pound's work by other than author