Pound, Ezra

Pound, Ezra (1885–1972), poet, critic.Born in Idaho, Pound grew up near Philadelphia. A precocious Latinist, he entered the University of Pennsylvania at age fifteen but transferred to Hamilton College, graduating in 1905. He returned to Penn to earn an M.A. in Romance languages in 1906. After teaching briefly at Wabash College in Indiana, he settled in London in 1908. Pound revolutionized poetry in the early twentieth century, befriending William Butler Yeats and Ford Maddox Ford; helping to found the Imagist and Vorticist movements; and sponsoring the work of then unknowns such as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams. His own early poems appeared in a series of small books (1909–1912). During World War I, Pound began The Cantos, an epic on which he continued to work until 1960. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914; moved to Paris in 1921; and to Rapallo, Italy, in 1925.

A vocal supporter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Pound broadcast over Rome Radio in support of the fascist regime. Indicted for treason in 1943, he was declared mentally incompetent in 1946 and confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His Pisan Cantos (1948) won the 1949 Bolligen Award, reigniting controversy over his wartime activities. The indictment was quashed in 1958, and Pound returned to Italy with his wife. He lapsed into silence in 1962 and was cared for during his remaining years by his companion, Olga Rudge. He died in Venice, where he is buried. Ezra Pound was the most influential poet of the twentieth century, but his support of fascism and his wartime anti‐Semitism have marred his reputation.
See also Literature: Since World War I; Modernist Culture.

Bibliography

Hugh Kenner , The Pound Era, 1971.
Ira Nadel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pound, 1998.

Tim Redman