Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 301885 –
November 11972) was an American expatriate poet and
critic who was a major figure of the Modernist movement
in early-to mid- 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several Modernist
movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism.
Early life and contemporaries
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, United States,
to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. He studied for two years at the University
of Pennsylvania and later received his M.A. in Romance philology from Hamilton College in 1905. During studies at Penn, he
met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he was engaged for a time. H.D. also became involved with a woman named Frances
Gregg around this time. Shortly afterwards, H.D. and Gregg, along with Gregg's mother, went to Europe.
Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In
1908 he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice.
The London revolution
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 and medieval Romance literature, as well as much
neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme, he began to cast off overtly
archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed William Butler Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England,[1] eventually being employed as the Irish poet's secretary. He was
also interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During the war, 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 Pound developed into what he called the
Ideogrammic Method. In 1914 , Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of
W.B. Yeats.
In the years before the First World War, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance
of Imagism, and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis. These two movements, which
helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Jacob Epstein, Richard
Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath
Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as central events in the birth of
English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's The Waste Land,
the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that Pound 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.".[2] 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. 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
entitled "The Invention of China" in his The Pound Era contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a book
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".[3] These
ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling
elegies for a warring West.
The 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 Leger 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. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then
returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925.[4] 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 made his first trip back home to the U.S. in many years in 1939, on the eve of World War
II, and considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. Aside from his political sympathy
with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. 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 (or Maria) 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 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. He became a leading Axis propagandist. He also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing, and he wrote many newspaper pieces.
He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural
matters. Pound believed that economics was the core issue at hand. 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 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 freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on political matters,
and incorporated anti-Semitism into his denunciations of the war.[5]
Ezra Pound - May 26, 1945
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave
transmitters were weak and unreliable, though it is clear that his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of books
and pamphlets) did have some influence in Italy. The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence 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.
On July 10, 1943, the Allied
forces landed in Sicily and rapidly began to overrun the southern part of Italy. On July 25,
1943 King Victor Emmanuel III summoned
Mussolini and dismissed him as the premier of the Kingdom of Italy. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was arrested and sent to
Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy (Abruzzo). About two months after he was stripped of power, Mussolini was rescued
and relocated to the north by the Germans, where he declared himself the President of the new Saló Republic. Pound played a significant role[citation needed] in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted
till the spring of 1945.
On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken
(according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where
he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a
United States Army detention camp outside Pisa,
spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work in
progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on
his place in the natural world. 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 the Kingdom of 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
Saló Republic, evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally
recognized by the United States. He was found unfit to face trial by reason of insanity by a
special federal jury[6] 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 not appear to be those
of a clinically insane person.[citation needed] Treason is potentially a capital
offense. As it turned out, there were a number of other American Axis collaborators who stood trial after the war without
being sentenced to death. Pound's controversial insanity plea[citation needed] is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author
and collaborator Knut Hamsun, who was dubbed insane by embarrassed authorities despite
evidence in the form of subsequent published material to the contrary.[7]
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, where he remained until his death in 1972.
E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was coddled by 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 three books, received visits from literary celebrities and enjoyed conjugal relations with
his wife and several mistresses. 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 was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos
as well as translating the Confucian classics.
Pound was also 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 did indeed rise
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 currency[8] 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, a system which provided more economic stability than any other 40-year period in American history.[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 there 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), and 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). 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 anti-Semitic statements and stopped his visits. 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.
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.[9] Fleming stated, when asked about Pound's anti-semitism, that Pound considered it a
mistake.[citation needed]
Return to Italy and death
On his release, Pound returned to Italy. Although he continued working on The Cantos, he seemed to view them as an
artistic failure. [citation needed] Pound died in Venice in 1972 two days after
his 87th birthday.
Musical quality of Pound's poetry
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
Francois 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 Francois 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 anticipating 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.
Importance
Because of his political views, his support of Mussolini, his opposition to central banking (The Federal Reserve, The Bank of
England...) and the charge of 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 titled 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. These
writers include W. B. Yeats,
