Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound
Photograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1913
Born	October 30, 1885(1885-10-30) Hailey, Idaho Territory, United States
Died	November 1, 1972 (aged 87) Venice, Italy
Occupation	Poet, critic
Literary movement	Modernism Imagism Vorticism
Notable work(s)	The Cantos
Influences Guido Cavalcanti, Confucius, Arnaut Daniel, C. H. Douglas, Ernest Fenollosa, Ford Madox Ford, Leo Frobenius, Silvio Gesell, Rémy de Gourmont, Henry James, Alfred Richard Orage, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats
Influenced George Antheil, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Marshall McLuhan, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Sheri Martinelli, Charles Bukowski

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist 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.^[1] The critic Hugh Kenner said of Pound upon meeting him: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."^[2]

In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a fruitful 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 Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on the Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promotion of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—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."^[3] His later work, spanning nearly fifty years, focused on his epic poem The Cantos.

Life

Early life

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, Thaddeus C. Pound;^[4] his mother was said to be related to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 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 Pennsylvania, but after studying there for two years transferred to Hamilton College, where he received his Ph.B. in 1905. He then returned to Penn, completing an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906.

During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a short time. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 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 Quarter type'".^[5] He had been taken to Europe by relatives in 1898 and again to Europe and Morocco in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, living first in Venice but eventually settling in London after spending a brief stint working as a tour guide in Gibraltar. Pound self-published A Lume Spento, his first published collection of short poems, while living in Venice.^[6]

London

The cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine BLAST.

Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th-century poets, medieval Romance literature (especially Provençal) and the neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy of that period. After he moved to London, the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme encouraged him to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms and begin to remake himself as a poet. Pound believed that William Butler Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England.^[7] 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 Sussex, England, studying Japanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, 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 Method. On April 20, 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, 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 Imagism, and coined the name of the movement Vorticism, which was led by his friend Wyndham Lewis. Pound contributed to Lewis' short-lived literary magazine 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 such poets and artists as James Joyce, Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Jacob Epstein, Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Later, Pound also edited his friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, marble, 1914

In 1915, Pound published Cathay, 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 Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga".^[8] 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 stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse 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, although Arthur Waley found them to be beautiful paraphrases. 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 Kenner, 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".^[9] 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 Mauberley (1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.

Paris

In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, 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 Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was also good friends with Basil Bunting and Ernest Hemingway, whom Pound asked to teach him to box. (Hemingway would later write, in A Moveable Feast: "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 politics and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose and translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's life.

Italy

On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. Near neighbours were Max Beerbohm and his wife Florence Kahn. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925.^[10] In Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors.

At this time Pound also 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 Vivaldi, 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.^[11] In addition to lobbying the US Customs and the House of Representatives, Pound wrote an essay in 1928 entitled "Article 211", where he related a trial to the recent decision to categorise the Nassak Diamond as a work of art, and therefore let it into the United States without payment of an import duty.^[11]

In 1933, he had a personal audience with Italy's prime minister Benito Mussolini 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 Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he learns a few concrete facts about both of them."^[12]

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, 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 Rudge: 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 Harbor. 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 II. Specifically, his talks were largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, 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 believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the war.^[13]

It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard Pound's radio broadcasts,^[14] 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 Carpenter, the broadcasts were "a masterly performance".^[15] 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."^[16] The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government, and transcripts, now stored in the Library of Congress, were made of them. Pound was indicted for treason by the United States government in 1943.

Mugshot of Pound in U.S. Army detention camp

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 Republic was established.

Pound also moved northwards^[17] On May 3, 1945, as Mussolini's puppet regime tumbled, Pound was arrested by partisans and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." At his request, he was then brought to the U.S. command in Lavagna, whence he was driven to the C.I.C. in Genoa. On May 24 he was transferred from Genoa to a United States Army detention camp north of Pisa. He spent 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent, and appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. 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 Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1949.

St. Elizabeths

After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Salò Republic, 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^[18] and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., 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.^[19][20]

E. Fuller Torrey 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 conjugal 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 Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics.

Pound was frequently visited by his protegé, a Library of Congress researcher named Eustace Mullins. 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 England 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). He advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He favored government issued currency^[21] with no interest to pay, preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764.^{[citation needed]} Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of Thomas Jefferson, as well as with Benjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.

Pound was also befriended at St. Elizabeths by Hugh Kenner, 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 Cantos, Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound had many friends and admirers among his fellow poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to Pound's situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeth's", and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. The artist Sheri Martinelli, meanwhile, is believed to have inspired the love poetry in Cantos XC–XCV. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky were among Pound's visitors, as was Guy Davenport, 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 Laubies, 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 Canal are worth something...." Charles Olson 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.^[22] Sinologist and budding Pound scholar Achilles Fang became an important correspondent on Chinese subjects, especially Confucius, during these years;^[23] he and Pound were to exchange 214 letters.^[24]

Rudd Fleming, a professor at the University of Maryland, visited Pound often. They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles' Electra, which was published by Princeton University Press in 1989.^[25] 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."^[26] Pound also declared in 1967, "The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism." ^[27]

Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. 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 Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen, then later to Rapallo and Venice). He remained in Italy until his death in 1972.

Death

Grave of Pound on the cemetery island of San Michele, Venice.

On his release, Pound returned to Italy continuing work on The Cantos. In 1972, two days after his 87th birthday, Pound died in Venice, where he is buried.

Pound and music

Pound's The Cantos 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 troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, 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 Catullus and François Villon. 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 impressionistic music of Claude Debussy. 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 Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno", for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of François Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti, a setting of 11 poems by Guido Cavalcanti (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 Antheil, 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 French for Le Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more elaborate than Stravinsky'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 arias, at a 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 bar 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 troubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting dissonance 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 polyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of harmony. 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 Thomson 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 Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory."

Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque 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 canto, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi 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 cadences, to a recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established laws of composition, history, physiology, reason, and love.

Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME", distinguishes his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently biased for complex, asymmetric, 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 symmetry, 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 Stravinsky.

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. Eliot—at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic Hugh Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement The Pound Era. The critic Marjorie Perloff 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 verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivists. The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of parataxis 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. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Immediately before the First World War 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-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis.

As a translator, Pound did much to introduce Provençal and Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. For example, he helped popularize major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the West to classical Japanese poetry and drama (the Noh theatre). He also translated and championed Greek, Latin 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 Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi and to promote early music generally. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects. Pound was also interested in mysticism and the occult, 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):

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ezra Pound

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ezra Pound

• 1908 A Lume Spento, poems (Venice)^[28]
• 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems (London).^[28]
• 1909 Personae, poems (London)^[28]
• 1909 Exultations, poems (London)^[28]
• 1910 Provenca, poems (Boston)^[28]
• 1910 The Spirit of Romance, essays (London)^[28]
• 1911 Canzoni, poems (London)^[28]
• 1912 Ripostes, poems (London)^[28]
• 1912 The Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations, (London)^[28]
• 1915 Cathay, poems / translations
• 1916: Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London)^[28]
• 1916 Certain noble plays of Japan: from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• 1916 "Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.
• 1916 "The Lake Isle", poem
• 1916 Lustra, poems.^[28]
• 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations
• 1918: Pavannes and Divisions, prose (New York)^[28]
• 1919 Quia Pauper Amavi, poems (London)^[28]
• 1918 Pavannes and Divisions, essays
• 1919 The Fourth Canto, poems
• 1920 Umbra, poems and translations (London)^[28]
• 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, poems (London)^[28]
• 1921 Poems, 1918–1921, poems (New York)^[28]
• 1922 The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations
• 1923 Indiscretions, essays
• 1923 Le Testament, one-act opera
• 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays (Paris)^[28]
• 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems (Paris)^[28]
• 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York)^[28]
• 1927 Exile, poems
• 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, poems
• 1928 Selected Poems, edited by T. S. Eliot (London)^[28]
• 1928 Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation
• 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems (New York)^[28]
• 1930 Imaginary Letters, essays
• 1931 How to Read, essays
• 1933 ABC of Economics, essays
• 1933 Cavalcanti, three-act opera
• 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems (New York)^[28]
• 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems (London)^[28]
• 1934 ABC of Reading, essays
• 1935 Make It New, essays
• 1936 Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound
• 1936 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, essays
• 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems (London)^[28]
• 1937 Polite Essays, essays
• 1937 Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation
• 1938 Culture, essays
• 1939 What Is Money For?, essays
• 1940 Cantos LII-LXXI, poems
• 1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le Cause della Guerra Presente, essays
• 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A., prose
• 1947 Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest, translation
• 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems (New York)^[28]
• 1950 Seventy Cantos, poems
• 1951 Confucian analects, translator
• 1953: The Translations of Ezra Pound, translations (London)^[28]
• 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)^[28]
• 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound, translation (London)^[28]
• 1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)^[28]
• 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems

Selected posthumous works and editions

• 1975: Selected Poems, 1908-1959, poems (London)^[28]
• 1976: Collected Early Poems (New York)^[28]
• 1975: The Cantos (New York) ISBN 0-8112-1326-9
• 1997 Ezra Pound and Music, essays
• 1990: 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 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, 2003) ISBN 978-1-931082-41-9
• 2005 Early Writings (New York) ISBN 0-14-218913-0

See also

• Modernist poetry in English
• The European - 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
• 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 (1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Cornell, Julien (1966). The Trial of Ezra Pound. A Documented Account of the Treason Case by the Defendant's Lawyer. London, Faber and Faber.
• 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 and Sappho. 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 (1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Laubies, René (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 (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.
• Furia, Philip (1984). Pound's Cantos Declassified. ISBN 0271003731. 

Notes

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
• Works by Ezra Pound at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ezra Pound in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry at Project Gutenberg , by T. S. Eliot
• 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

• Pound's Collected Poetry Recordings, University of Pennsylvania, read by Pound
• Recording of sections from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and others, read by Pound (RealAudio).
• EarthStation1: Ezra Pound WWII Propaganda Broadcast Audio
• Ego scriptor cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, excerpts from the two operas plus three works for solo violin, selected from performances all over the world.
• "The Four Steps" talk, in which Pound outlines his antipathy towards all forms of bureaucracy - BBC Home Service June 21, 1958 (RealAudio).

Readings of Ezra Pound's work by other than author

• Complete recordings with full text of all 15 Cathay translations. (Public domain MP3)
• Recording with full text Two selections from Pound's Ripostes: "The Seafarer" and "The Alchemist." (Public domain MP3)