Ezra pound brief biography of maya

Biography[]

One of the most influential poets of the early modern period, Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in a provincial town in Idaho and grew up in Pennsylvania. Disappointed with American life and culture, he soon went to Europe and took a deep interest in the old literatures of Provence and of Italy. Pound lived in Italy and, from 1909-1920, in London, working as translator, literary critic, poet, and editor of journals. He discovered and promoted such writers as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Ernest Hemingway while living in Paris (1920-24) and again in Italy (1940-45).

Opposed to capitalism and Jews, he supported the Fascist movement and saw in Mussolini a follower of Thomas Jefferson. Because of his pro-Fascist and anti-American radio broadcasts during the war, he was arrested and charged with treason in 1945. Until 1958 he was in a mental institution in America and then returned to live in Italy.

He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. He associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and improved. He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe’s important Chicago magazine Poetry and spearheading the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up in Italian F

[This was the intro to my Feb. 9, 2022 e-mail. I liked it, so now it’s a standalone post. Drawing of Pound by me.]

“You — find me — in fragments,” said the old poet to the young poet, on the threshold of a doorway in Rome.

Or so goes Donald Hall’s recollection of the first words Ezra Pound spoke to him, as they met for several days of conversation that would become a Paris Review Writers At Work interview. It was 1960; two years earlier Pound had been released from a hospital for the criminally insane, after 13 years of confinement.

Hall wrote about his week with Pound and its aftermath in his book Old Poets (previously published in 1978 as Remembering Poets, then expanded in 1992 as Their Ancient Glittering Eyes and now reissued as Old Poets). It’s the culmination of a series of essays about poets whom he interviewed or under whom he studied: Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore and Pound.

Reading the book last week — alternating between Kindle of Old Poets, and hardcover of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes bought at Faulkner House Books in New Orleans — I was transported by Hall’s prose, but I also found myself comparing our experiences of meeting & interviewing our literary heroes. The comparison breaks down because Hall was an accomplished poet by the time of these literary encounters while I’m some zhlub from New Jersey, but I felt such empathy for his anxiety before these sessions, his desire to win their approval. The recollections — of a man in his early 30s by a man in his mid-50s and 60s — are never tinged with regret at his youthful behavior, and capture the reverence with which Hall held the great poets of his lifetime. He also found time to conduct literary analysis and to dish hot goss. (The Marianne Moore essay in particular is unforgettable, for the sheer weirdness of Moore’s life, the effect she had on

(1885-1972)

Who Was Ezra Pound?

Poet Ezra Pound studied literature and languages in college and in 1908 left for Europe, where he published several successful books of poetry. Pound advanced a "modern" movement in English and American literature. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his arrest and confinement until 1958.

Early Years and Career

Pound was born in the small mining town of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. The only child of Homer Loomis Pound, a Federal Land Office official, and his wife, Isabel, Ezra spent the bulk of his childhood just outside Philadelphia, where his father had moved the family after accepting a job with the U.S. Mint. His childhood seems to have been a happy one. He eventually attended Cheltenham Military Academy, staying there two years before leaving to finish his high school education at a local public school.

In 1901, Pound enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but left after two years and transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy. By this time, Pound knew full well that he wanted to be a poet. At the age of 15, he had told his parents as much. Though his chosen vocation certainly wasn't something he had inherited directly from his more conventional mother and father, Homer and Isabel were supportive of their son's choice.

In 1907, after finishing college, Pound accepted a teaching job at Indiana's Wabash College. But the fit between the artistic, somewhat bohemian poet and the formal institution was less than perfect, and Pound soon left.

His next move proved to be more daring. In 1908, with just $80 in his pocket, he set sail for Europe and landed in Venice brimming with confidence that he would soon make a name for himself in the world of poetry. With his own money, Pound paid for the publication of his first book of poems, "A Lume Spento."

Despite the fact that the work did not create