Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). Pound was born within a few years of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot, and he was instrumental in promoting the careers of each one of these writers — as well as many, many others. He was a champion of modern poetry and prose; Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair proclaimed that it was Ezra Pound "more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it." He was extraordinarily generous with his clout, often described as "the poet's poet." Pound's mantra was "Make it new."
He'd earned a grant to study Romantic languages and literature in Europe, and then returned to the United States and got a teaching position a Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. But his rising academic star fell four months later when he allowed a stranded vaudeville actress to sleep over at his place. His landlady disapproved, his college superiors were notified, and in the ensuing scandal the 22-year-old Pound was dismissed from his professorial duties. (He later claimed all accusations were "ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin Quarter type.'") Nevertheless, when the college fired him, they also gave him the rest of his year's salary, and with it he headed back to Europe.
Pound spent time in Venice and moved to London. He believed that William Butler Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English, and he was determined to find him and apprentice himself to the master. He befriended Yeats in England, worked as his secretary for a while, and even lived with him for a period in a cottage at Sussex. Once, when Yeats was lecturing on at an informal gathering about the intersection of poetry and music, Pound began eating two red tulips to get some attention.
Later, in 1914, Pound would marry Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats's former lover. It was that same year that he met T.S. Eliot, whom Pound is credited with "discovering" after pushing for the publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry magazine.
Pound lived in England for eight years, and his Kensington flat became a hive of modern literary activity. He helped found the Imagist movement, along with H.D. — pen name of Hilda Doolittle — and declared its principles to be "direct treatment of the thing," to use only words that "contribute to the presentation," and in regard to rhythm: "to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."
He wrote a famous poem called "In a Station of the Metro," which goes:
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough."
He wrote it after getting off a train at La Concorde station in Paris and seeing a succession of beautiful faces; he found expression for his emotion came not in speech, he said, "but in little splotches of colour." At first, he wrote a 30-line poem about it, which he destroyed. Six months later, he wrote a poem half the length of the original, and then a year later he wrote this two-line poem, which consists of just 14 words.
Pound spent most of his writing life on The Cantos, a modern epic. The first was published in 1917. He completed 109 of his Cantos; an additional eight were incomplete but published. The first of The Cantos begins:
"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."
Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)
During World War I, Ezra Pound was an American émigré in London and the impresario behind imagism and vorticism in England. After many of his friends were killed in the trenches, including the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he described his postwar activities in the following terms: “1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same.” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, from which the following two excerpts are taken, is one result of Pound’s war-guilt investigations.
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case. . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
Fortitude as never before
Frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
