Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic who energetically promoted the cause of modernism and artistically shaped and promoted the work of William Butler Yeats, D.H.Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. Born in Idaho in 1885, he grew up in Philadelphia and studied Romance Languages at university. He lectured at Wabash College and travelled in Spain, France and Italy and London. He published volumes of poetry, lectures and critical essays. He became an established figure in London literary life but moved to Paris then Italy. He was disillusioned with England and sympathised with Mussolini's fascist politics, broadcasting his Anti-American views during World War Two. After the war he was arrested but regarded as unfit for trial and resided in a New York psychiatric hospital until 1958. He continued to work on his Cantos until his death in Venice in 1972.
Influenced by Yeats, Pound's collection of poetry Personae (1909) also was inspired by Browning's dramatic monologues. His collections of letters and criticism include The Spirit of Romance (1910), A B C of Reading (1934) and Guide to Kulchur (1938). In Ripostes (1912) he introduced free-verse forms that he later used in Lustra (1916). Pound developed an interest in Chinese culture and published a book of translations from Chinese called Cathay (1915). This inspired his own work, The Cantos, that he published in sections from 1925. Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917) is a playful and erotic rendition of an Augustan love elegist, deliberately misread for humorous effect. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) is a brilliant and ironic verse history of English culture damning it as intellectually feeble and restricted.
Pound is a controversial figure, condemned as obscure, elitist and ultimately naive about modernity itself. His early work was influenced by the late Romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelite movement with a deliberate attempt to render it classical and medieval in subject and approach; poetry was akin to escapism from the prosaic present. Later on he became a spokesperson for ‘Imagism' – a modernist movement inspired by classical Japanese and Chinese poetic forms, concentrating on direct treatment of the subject, reducing the words to those that contribute to musical phrasing rather than metronome sequence. The work of Imagists has a clarity, economy and formal freedom, juxtaposing allusions, quotations and narrative. Pound worked on his modernist epic Cantos for almost fifty years, the composition becoming ever more elliptical and obscure arguably more for effect than as a result of inherent complexity. His fanatical anti-Semitism was central to what critic F.R.Leavis described as a ‘terrible degeneration' from his more remarkable work as a poet and advocate of modernism.