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Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972), full name Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, was an expatriate US poet and critic. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962). He is known for contributing literary movements like modernism and imagism stressing precision and economy of language. He helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce while working in London. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."

His life and works became controversial. He blamed finance capitalism for World War I. He embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler during World War II. He criticized the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers and mongers, and Jews, among others, as causes, abettors and prolongers of the World War II. The US forces arrested him in Italy in 1945, after which he spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

While in custody in Italy, published The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972.

Wisdom & Quotes

  • Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Singh: Goddamm.
- Ancient Music

Jules Romains

Page last modified on Saturday November 12, 2022 16:15:11 GMT-0000