Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, 1885–1972
Poet Ezra Pound authored more than 70 books and promoted many other now-famous writers, including James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
Who Was Ezra Pound?
Poet Ezra Pound studied literature and languages in college and in 1908 left for Europe, where he published several successful books of poetry. Pound advanced a "modern" movement in English and American literature. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his arrest and confinement until 1958.
Early Years and Career
Pound was born in the small mining town of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. The only child of Homer Loomis Pound, a Federal Land Office official, and his wife, Isabel, Ezra spent the bulk of his childhood just outside Philadelphia, where his father had moved the family after accepting a job with the U.S. Mint. His childhood seems to have been a happy one. He eventually attended Cheltenham Military Academy, staying there two years before leaving to finish his high school education at a local public school.
In 1901, Pound enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but left after two years and transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy. By this time, Pound knew full well that he wanted to be a poet. At the age of 15, he had told his parents as much. Though his chosen vocation certainly wasn't something he had inherited directly from his more conventional mother and father, Homer and Isabel were supportive of their son's choice.
In 1907, after finishing college, Pound accepted a teaching job at Indiana's Wabash College. But the fit between the artistic, somewhat bohemian poet and the formal institution was less than perfect, and Pound soon left.
His next move proved to be more daring. In 1908, with just $80 in his pocket, he set sail for Europe and landed in Venice brimming with confidence that he would soon make a name for himself in the world of poetry. With his own money, Pound paid for the publication of his first book of poems, "A Lume Spento."
Despite the fact that the work did not create the kind of fireworks he had hoped for, it did open some important doors for him. In late 1908, Pound traveled to London, where he befriended the influential writer and editor Ford Madox Ford, as well as William Butler Yeats. His friendship with Yeats, in particular, was a close one, and Pound eventually took a job as the writer's secretary, and later served as best man at his wedding.
Success Abroad
In 1909, Pound found the kind of success as a writer that he had wanted. Over the next year, he produced three books, Personae, Exultations and The Spirit of Romance, the last one based on the lectures he had given in London. All three books were warmly received. Wrote one reviewer that Pound "is that rare thing among modern poets, a scholar."
In addition, Pound wrote numerous reviews and critiques for a variety of publications, such as New Age, The Egoist and Poetry. As his friend T.S. Eliot would later note, "During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately 1912–1922, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic in England or America."
In 1912, Pound helped create a movement that he and others called "Imagism," which signaled a new literary direction for the poet. At the core of Imagism, was a push to set a more direct course with language, shedding the sentiment that had so wholly shaped Victorian and Romantic poetry.
Precision and economy were highly valued by Pound and the other proponents of the movement, which included F.S. Flint, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle. With its focus on the "thing" as the "thing," Imagism reflected the changes happening in other art forms, most notably painting and the Cubists.
Pound's maxims included, "Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose" and "Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something." But Pound's connection to Imagism was short-lived. After just a few years, he stepped aside, frustrated when he couldn't secure total control of the movement from Lowell and the others.
Famous Friendships
Pound's influence extended in other directions. He had an incredible eye for talent and tirelessly promoted writers whose works he felt demanded attention. He introduced the world to up-and-coming poets like Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence, and was Eliot's editor. In fact, it was Pound who edited Eliot's "The Waste Land," which many consider to be one of the greatest poems produced during the modernist era.
Over the years, Pound and Eliot would become great friends. Early in his career, when Eliot abandoned his graduate studies in philosophy at Oxford, it was Pound who wrote the young poet's parents to break the news to them.
Pound's lineup of friends also included the Irish novelist James Joyce, whom he helped introduce to publishers and find landing spots in magazines for several of the stories in "The Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." During Joyce's leanest years, Pound helped him with money and even, it is said, helped secure for him an old pair of shoes to wear.
'The Cantos'
Pound's own work continued to flourish as well. The years immediately following World War I saw the production of two of his most admired works, "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1919) and the 18-part "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1921), the latter of which tackled a wide range of subjects, from the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I.
In late 1920, after 12 years in London, Pound left England for a new start in Paris. But his tolerance for French life, it seems, was limited. In 1924, tired of the Parisian scene, Pound moved again, this time settling in the Italian city of Rapallo, where he would remain for the next two decades. It was here that Pound's life changed significantly. In 1925, he had a daughter, Maria, with American violinist Olga Rudge, and the following year he had a son, Omar, with his wife, Dorothy.
Professionally, Pound had turned his full attention to "The Cantos," an ambitious long- form poem he had begun in 1915. A work he self-described as his "poem including history," "The Cantos" revealed Pound's interest in economics and in the world's changing financial landscape in the wake of World War I.
The first section of the poem was published in 1925, with later editions appearing later ("Eleven New Cantos," 1934; "The Fifth Decade of Cantos," 1937; "Cantos LII-LXXI," 1940).
Fascist Connections
As Pound's interest in economics and economic history increased, he showed his support for the theories of Major C.H. Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, an economic theory that believed that the poor distribution of wealth was due to insufficient purchasing power on the part of governments. Pound began to see a world of injustice shaped by international bankers, whose manipulation of money led to wars and conflict.
Pound's impassioned feelings on the matter soon led him to support the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. In 1939, Pound visited the United States in the hope that he could help prevent war between his native country and his adopted one. But success eluded him, and upon his return to Italy, Pound set out recording hundreds of broadcasts for Rome Radio in which he threw his support behind Mussolini, condemned the United States, and claimed that a group of Jewish bankers had directed America into war.
In 1945, partisans arrested Pound and handed him over to U.S. Forces, who held him for six months at a detention center outside Pisa. He was then flown back to the United States to stand trial for treason, but was found to be insane and was directed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington DC, where he remained until 1958.
Pound's exact state of mind during this time has come into question over the years. In the early 1980s, a full decade after Pound's death, a professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin presented evidence that Pound was indeed sane enough to stand trial for treason. However, it was certainly true that Pound was healthy enough to work. During his imprisonment in Italy he finished the "Pisan Cantos," which The New York Times praised as "among the masterpieces of the century."
Pound continued to write during his confinement at St. Elizabeths as well. There he completed additional sections of his long poem, "Section: Rock-Drill," published in 1955, and "Thrones," which appeared in 1959.
In 1958, Frost spearheaded a successful campaign to free Pound from the comfortable confines of St. Elizabeths. Pound returned to Italy immediately, and in 1969, published "Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII."
Publicly, Pound spoke little about his work, but on the rare occasion he did, he described "The Cantos" as a failed work of poetry. Whether Pound truly felt that way about his defining work is often debated.
Death
Pound passed away in Venice in 1972 and was buried on the cemetery island Isole di San Michele. Over the course of his long, productive lifetime, Pound published 70 books of his own writing, had a hand in some 70 others and authored more than 1,500 articles.
Selected Poems by EZRA POUND
In A Station Of The Metro
by EZRA POUND
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.L'Art
by EZRA POUND
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.The Tree
by EZRA POUND
I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.The Garden
by EZRA POUND
En robe de parade. Samain
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
Tof a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
Twill commit that indiscretion.Salutation
by EZRA POUND
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.The Return
by EZRA POUND
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.
Gods of the Wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!The Lake Isle
by EZRA POUND
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by EZRA POUND
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight
across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling
flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with
blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of
Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or
suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never
looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with
yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river
of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise
overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went
out,
By the gate now, the moss is grown,
the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in
wind.
The paired butterflies are already
yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
(Translated by Ezra Pound)Canto XXXVI
by EZRA POUND
A Lady asks me
I speak in season
She seeks reason for an affect, wild often
That is so proud he hath Love for a name
Who denys it can hear the truth now
Wherefore I speak to the present knowers
Having no hope that low-hearted
Can bring sight to such reason
Be there not natural demonstration
I have no will to try proof-bringing
Or say where it hath birth
What is its virtu and power
Its being and every moving
Or delight whereby ‘tis called "to love"
Or if man can show it to sight.
Where memory liveth,
it takes its state
Formed like a diafan from light on shade
Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth
Created, having a name sensate,
Custom of the soul,
will from the heart;
Cometh from a seen form which being understood
Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible
Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing,
Descendeth not by quality but shineth out
Himself his own effect unendingly
Not in delight but in the being aware
Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere.
He is not vertu but cometh of that perfection
Which is so postulate not by the reason
But ‘tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth his judging force
Deeming intention to be reason's peer and mate,
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness' friend
Often his power cometh on death in the end,
Be it withstayed
and so swinging counterweight.
Not that it were natural opposite, but only
Wry'd a bit from the perfect,
Let no man say love cometh from chance
Or hath not established lordship
Holding his power even though
Memory hath him no more.
Cometh he to be
when the will
From overplus
Twisteth out of natural measure,
Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour
Either to laugh or weep
Contorting the face with fear
resteth but a little
Yet shall ye see of him That he is most often
With folk who deserve him
And his strange quality sets sighs to move
Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind
And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame.
Unskilled can not form his image,
He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness,
Neither turneth about to seek his delight
Nor yet to see out proving
Be it so great or so small.
He draweth likeness and hue from like nature
So making pleasure more certain in seeming
Nor can stand hid in such nearness,
Beautys be darts tho' not savage
Skilled from such fear a man follows
Deserving spirit, that pierceth.
Nor is he known from his face
But taken in the white light that is allness
Toucheth his aim
Who heareth, seeth not form
But is led by its emanation
Being divided, set out from colour,
Disjunct in mid darkness
Grazeth the light, one moving by other,
Being divided, divided from all falsity
Worthy of trust
From him alone mercy proceedeth.
Go, song, surely thou mayest
Whither it please thee
For so art thou ornate that thy reasons
Shall be praised from thy understanders,
With others hast thou no will to make company.
"Called thrones, balascio or topaze"
Eriugina was not understood in his time
"which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him"
And they went looking for Manicheans
And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans
So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugina
"Authority comes from right reason,
never the other way on"
Hence the delay in condemning him
Aquinas head down in a vacuum,
Aristotle which way in a vacuum?
Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu.
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana
of a castle named Goito.
"Five castles!
"Five castles!"
(king giv' him five castles)
"And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!"
His Holiness has written a letter:
"CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou….
..way you treat your men is a scandal…."
Dilectis miles familiaris…castra Montis Odorisii
Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile…
In partibus Thetis….vineland
land tilled
the land incult
pratis nemoribus pascuis
with legal jurisdiction
his heirs of both sexes,
…sold the damn lot six weeks later,
Sordellus de Godio.
Quan ben m'albir e mon ric pensamen.Canto XVI
by EZRA POUND
And before hell mouth; dry plain
and two mountains;
On the one mountain, a running form,
and another
In the turn of the hill; in hard steel
The road like a slow screw's thread,
The angle almost imperceptible,
so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise;
And the running form, naked, Blake,
Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs,
Howling against the evil,
his eyes rolling,
Whirling like flaming cart-wheels,
and his head held backward to gaze on the evil
As he ran from it,
to be hid by the steel mountain,
And when he showed again from the north side;
his eyes blazing toward hell mouth,
His neck forward,
and like him Peire Cardinal.
And in the west mountain, Il Fiorentino,
Seeing hell in his mirror,
and lo Sordels
Looking on it in his shield;
And Augustine, gazing toward the invisible.
And past them, the criminal
lying in the blue lakes of acid,
The road between the two hills, upward
slowly,
The flames patterned in lacquer, crimen est actio,
The limbo of chopped ice and saw-dust,
And I bathed myself with acid to free myself
of the hell ticks,
Scales, fallen louse eggs.
Palux Laerna,
the lake of bodies, aqua morta,
of limbs fluid, and mingled, like fish heaped in a bin,
and here an arm upward, clutching a fragment of marble,
And the embryos, in flux,
new inflow, submerging,
Here an arm upward, trout, submerged by the eels;
and from the bank, the stiff herbage
the dry nobbled path, saw many known, and unknown,
for an instant;
submerging,
The face gone, generation.
Then light, air, under saplings,
the blue banded lake under æther,
an oasis, the stones, the calm field,
the grass quiet,
and passing the tree of the bough
The grey stone posts,
and the stair of gray stone,
the passage clean-squared in granite:
descending,
and I through this, and into the earth,
patet terra,
entered the quiet air
the new sky,
the light as after a sun-set,
and by their fountains, the heroes,
Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello,
and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities.
The plain, distance, and in fount-pools
the nymphs of that water
rising, spreading their garlands,
weaving their water reeds with the boughs,
In the quiet,
and now one man rose from his fountain
and went off into the plain.
Prone in that grass, in sleep;
et j'entendis des voix:…
wall . . . Strasbourg
Galliffet led that triple charge. . . Prussians
and he said [Plarr's narration]
it was for the honour of the army.
And they called him a swashbuckler.
I didn't know what it was
But I thought: This is pretty bloody damn fine.
And my old nurse, he was a man nurse, and
He killed a Prussian and he lay in the street
there in front of our house for three days
And he stank. . . . . . .
Brother Percy,
And our Brother Percy…
old Admiral
He was a middy in those days,
And they came into Ragusa
. . . . . . place those men went for the Silk War. . . . .
And they saw a procession coming down through
A cut in the hills, carrying something
The six chaps in front carrying a long thing
on their shoulders,
And they thought it was a funeral,
but the thing was wrapped up in scarlet,
And he put off in the cutter,
he was a middy in those days,
To see what the natives were doing,
And they got up to the six fellows in livery,
And they looked at it, and I can still hear the old admiral,
"Was it? it was
Lord Byron
Dead drunk, with the face of an A y n. . . . . . . .
He pulled it out long, like that:
the face of an a y n . . . . . . . . gel."
And because that son of a bitch,
Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . .
And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche…
They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
dug through corpses
With a lot of kids of sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,
And he sent a chit back to his major:
I can hold out for ten minutes
With my sergeant and a machine-gun.
And they rebuked him for levity.
And Henri Gaudier went to it,
and they killed him,
And killed a good deal of sculpture,
And ole T.E.H. he went to it,
With a lot of books from the library,
London Library, and a shell buried ‘em in a dug-out,
And the Library expressed its annoyance.
And a bullet hit him on the elbow
…gone through the fellow in front of him,
And he read Kant in the Hospital, in Wimbledon,
in the original,
And the hospital staff didn't like it.
And Wyndham Lewis went to it,
With a heavy bit of artillery,
and the airmen came by with a mitrailleuse,
And cleaned out most of his company,
and a shell lit on his tin hut,
While he was out in the privy,
and he was all there was left of that outfit.
Windeler went to it,
and he was out in the Ægæan,
And down in the hold of his ship
pumping gas into a sausage,
And the boatswain looked over the rail,
down into amidships, and he said:
Gees! look a' the Kept'n,
The Kept'n's a-gettin' ‘er up.
And Ole Captain Baker went to it,
with his legs full of rheumatics,
So much so he couldn't run,
so he was six months in hospital,
Observing the mentality of the patients.
And Fletcher was 19 when he went to it,
And his major went mad in the control pit,
about midnight, and started throwing the ‘phone about
And he had to keep him quiet
till abut six in the morning,
And direct that bunch of artillery.
And Ernie Hemingway went to it,
too much in a hurry,
And they buried him for four days.
Et ma foi, vous savez,
tous les nerveux. Non,
Y a une limite; les bêtes, les bêtes ne sont
Pas faites pour ça, c'est peu de chose un cheval.
Les hommes de 34 ans à quatre pattes
qui criaient "maman." Mais les costauds,
La fin, là à Verdun, n'y avait que ces gros bonshommes
Et y voyaient extrêmement clair.
Qu'est-ce que ça vaut, les généraux, le lieutenant,
on les pèse à un centigramme,
n'y a rien que du bois,
Notr' capitaine, tout, tout ce qu'il y a de plus renfermé
de vieux polytechnicien, mais solide,
La tête solide. Là, vous savez,
Tout, tout fonctionne, et les voleurs, tous les vices,
Mais les rapaces,
y avait trois dans notre compagnie, tous tués.
Y sortaient fouiller un cadavre, pour rien,
y n'serainet sortis pour rien que ça.
Et les boches, tout ce que vous voulez,
militarisme, et cætera, et cætera.
Tout ça, mais, MAIS,
l'français, i s'bat quand y a mangé.
Mais ces pauvres types
A la fin y s'attaquaient pour manger,
Sans orders, les bêtes sauvages, on y fait
Prisonniers; ceux qui parlaient français disaient:
"Poo quah? Ma foi on attaquait pour manger."
C'est le corr-ggras, le corps gras,
leurs trains marchaient trois kilomètres à l'heure,
Et ça criait, ça grincait, on l'entendait à cinq kilomètres.
(Ça qui finit la guerre.)
Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000.
I vous dit, bè, voui, tout sentait le pétrole.
Mais, Non! je l'ai engueulé.
Je lui ai dit: T'es un con! T'a raté la guerre.
O voui! tous les homes de goût, y conviens,
Tout ça en arrière.
Mais un mec comme toi!
C't homme, un type comme ça!
Ce qu'il aurait pu encaisser!
Il était dans une fabrique.
What, burying squad, terrassiers, avec leur tête
en arrière, qui regardaient comme ça,
On risquait la vie pour un coup de pelle,
Faut que ça soit bein carré, exact…
Dey vus a bolcheviki dere, und dey dease him:
Looka vat youah Trotzsk is done, e iss
madeh deh zhamefull beace!!
"He iss madeh de zhamefull beace, iss he?
"He is madeh de zhamevull beace?
"A Brest-Litovsk, yess? Aint yuh herd?
"He vinneh de vore.
"De droobs iss released vrom de eastern vront, yess?
"Un venn dey getts to deh vestern vront, iss it
"How many getts dere?
"And dose doat getts dere iss so full off revolutions
"Venn deh vrench is come dhru, yess,
"Dey say, "Vot?" Un de posch say:
"Aint yeh heard? Say, ve got a rheffolution."
That's the trick with a crowd,
Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving.
And all the time, there were people going
Down there, over the river.
There was a man there talking,
To a thousand, just a short speech, and
Then move ‘em on. And he said:
Yes, these people, they are all right, they
Can do everything, everything except act;
And go an' hear ‘em but when they are through
Come to the bolsheviki…
And when it broke, there was the crowd there,
And the cossacks, just as always before,
But one thing, the cossacks said:
"Pojalouista."
And that got round in the crowd,
And then a lieutenant of infantry
Ordered ‘em to fire into the crowd,
in the square at the end of the Nevsky,
In front of the Moscow station,
And they wouldn't,
And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing,
And killed him,
And a cossack rode out of his squad
On the other side of the square
And cut down the lieutenant of infantry
And there was the revolution…
as soon as they named it.
And you can't make ‘em,
Nobody knew it was coming. They were all ready, the old gang,
Guns on the top of the post-office and the palace,
But none of the leaders knew it was coming.
And there were some killed at the barracks,
But that was between the troops.
So we used to hear it at the opera
That they wouldn't be under Haig;
and that the advance was beginning;
That it was going to begin in a week.