Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972), the co-founder of
modernism and America's most contentious poet was born in
Halley,
Idaho, educated at Cheltenham College and at Pennsylvania
University, transferring to Hamilton College to gain an
MA in 1905. He was appointed Instructor in French and Spanish
at Wabash College in 1907, but dismissed a year later. Pound
then went to London,
becoming a noted
figure in the literary avant-garde,
pamphleteering
and writing
the poetry
for which he is best remembered. He married, but also began
a lifelong liaison with Olga Rudge. After W.W.I, Pound retired
to Italy, where he lived quietly on his wife's
inheritance and applied himself to translation and writing
the Cantos.
Dreaming of a new society, and sympathetic to Mussolini,
Pound broadcast
for the Axis powers during W.W.II, was incarcerated as a
POW in 1945 and then as an inmate of St.
Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, DC Released
in 1958, after his Pisan Cantos won the Bollingen
Award, Pound returned to Italy, only briefly leaving
to attend Eliot's funeral and see friends in Paris and the
States. Depressed and finally silent,
he died in Venice, and is buried there.
Pound's interests shifted after 1920 to economics and government,
but he also applied himself to the Cantos,
whose sprawling 23,000 lines many see as the great poetry
achievement of the twentieth century, influencing Zukofsky,
the projective
verse school, Wright,
Bly,
Duncan,
Ashbery
and many contemporary
figures. The Cantos juxtapose voices from the whole range
of human existence, though dwelling much on the renaissance,
Chinese history and eighteenth century monetary policies.
The poem is a kaleidoscope of vivid fragments, where voices
speak for themselves, giving immediacy and a richness of
texture. Later Cantos take the process further, using "ideograms"
to make presentations more direct and author-independent
— themes which Postmodernism explores. And however
baffling at first, many passages achieved a rare beauty
of phrasing, opening doors to poets
escaping from strict forms.
