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Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=162

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Ezra Pound including a biography, online primary texts, an audio file, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Ezra Pound.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound studied at the University of Pennsylvania for two years before graduating from Hamilton College in 1905. Following a two year teaching stint at Wabash College, Pound traveled to Europe in 1908 where he met W. B. Yeats. By 1911, Pound had published six volumes of verse whose style reflected Pound's interests in Provençal and Italian literary models. Influenced by such modernists as Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme, Pound founded the Imagist movement in 1912 and later propounded the more dynamic compositional style of Vorticism. Reflecting his study of Ernest Fenollosa and the Chinese written character, Pound published Cathay in 1915, the year after his marriage to Dorothy Shakespear. Moving to the center of London's international literary scene, Pound became the editor of the Little Review in 1917. Deeply troubled by the events of the First World War, Pound wrote "Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921) that protested what Pound criticized as the cultural decadence and wasted promise of the war generation. At this time, Pound was also editing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), leading Eliot to name him as il miglior fabbro or "the better craftsman." By 1924 Pound had left London to settle in Rapallo where he began to compose a long "poem including history" that would evolve into The Cantos. Following the publication of the first section of The Cantos in 1925, Pound expanded them with the release of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), followed by Cantos 31-70 published between 1934-1940. Throughout the 1930s, Pound became increasingly involved with Italian fascism that culminated in his infamous Rome Radio addresses that promoted the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and anti-Semitism. After Pound's six-month detention in the Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, Pound was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for treason in 1945. Instead, the poet was diagnosed as insane and was an inmate at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington DC from 1946-1958. Nevertheless, he continued on as poet, publishing The Pisan Cantos (1948), Section: Rock-Drill (1955), Thrones (1959), and Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1969). Upon his release from St. Elizabeth's, Pound lived out the remaining years in Italy, eventually settling in Venice where he died in 1972.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Baumann, Walter. Roses from the Steel Dust: Collected Essays on Ezra Pound. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2000.

Grieve, Thomas F. Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Homberger, Eric, Ed. Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage. (1972). New York: Routledge, 1997.

Nadel, Ira Bruce, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Preda, Roxana. Ezra Pound's (Post)Modern Poetics and Politics: Logocentrism, Language, and Truth. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Surette, Leon. Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Wilson, Peter. A Preface to Ezra Pound. New York: Longman, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER