| American poet Ezra Pound, was born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). Early in his life he resolved to "know more about poetry than any man living." He went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met one of the many writers he would befriend and help in his life, William Carlos Williams. He settled in London in 1908, where he began to explore the poetry of Greece, China, America, and contemporary England. Pound was set on supporting innovations in all kinds of literature. He critically and financially supported writers like James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. He said he had "to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization." The poet whom Pound helped the most was T.S. Eliot. In 1914, he convinced a publisher to print Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Seven years later, he edited Eliot's work, "The Waste Land" (1922), considered one of the twentieth century's best poems. Eliot dedicated the book to Pound, whom he called "il miglior fabbro," or the better craftsman. Pound wrote to Eliot, "You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag." One of Pound's most direct contributions to poetry was the founding of the Imagist movement. Imagist poetry is based on close observation of one image, using dialect instead of poetic diction, and using, in Pound's words, "the sequence of the musical phrase, not the sequence of a metronome." One of Pound's most famous Imagist poems is "In a Station of the Metro," published in Poetry magazine in 1913: The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough . In 1917 Pound wrote, in a letter to James Joyce, "I have begun an endless poem, of no known category . . . all about everything." The collection of poems that resulted, The Cantos, occupied him nearly the rest of his life, and became his most famous work. The Cantos are appreciated and criticized for being obscure and very difficult to read. Pound intended the poems to create an epic, to dramatize "the acquisition of cultural knowledge." During World War II, Pound moved to Italy, where he began doing radio broadcasts for the Italian government under Mussolini. He seemed to endorse fascism, and many of his comments were anti-Semitic. For these reasons, Pound was arrested by the United States army for treason. He was kept in a small, outdoor cage in an army base outside of Pisa, Italy, where he suffered mental and physical exhaustion. But he managed to write a few more poems for his Cantos, and in 1949 Pound won the prestigious Bollingen Award, to much controversy. Pound was taken to America, and was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. He moved to a mental institution in Washington D.C., where he lived until 1958. He said, "I can get along with the crazy people, it's only the fools I can't stand." Many people never believed he was insane, and his friends and admirers came to visit him often. He told them, "I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them." When he was released, he moved to his beloved Italy, where he fell into despair over much of the work he'd done. He told Allen Ginsberg, "the worst mistake I made was the stupid, suburban prejudice of Anti-Semitism." He died in 1977. ~Writer's Almanac |
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