Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 04:07, 16 September 2020

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, who became a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and the unfinished 120-section, 800-page epic The Cantos (1917–1969).

Pound's contribution to poetry began with his contribution to the development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language. Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

Angered by the carnage of World War I (1914–1918), Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury". He moved to Italy in 1924 and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he persuaded the Italian government to let him make hundreds of paid, antisemitic radio broadcasts attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months detained in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". 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, Pound began to work on sections of The Cantos published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy. Largely because of a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972. His political views have ensured that his life and work remain controversial.

Early life (1885–1908)

Background

Pound was born in a small, two-story house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948). His father had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office. Both parents' ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth (1594–1675), a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the Connecticut constitution. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York. Harding Weston and Mary Parker were the parents of Isabel Weston, Ezra's mother. Harding Weston apparently spent most of his life without work; his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Weston (Aunt Frank), looked after Mary's and Isabel's needs.

On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound (1832–1914), was a Republican Congressman from northwest Wisconsin who made and lost a fortune in the lumber business. Thaddeus's son Homer, Pound's father, worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business until Thaddeus secured him the appointment as registrar of the Hailey land office. Homer and Isabel married the following year, in 1884.

Education

Early education

Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old. Her husband followed them, and in 1889 he found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and in 1893 bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote.

Pound's education began in a series of dame schools, some run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892; the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893; and the Florence Ridpath school from 1894, also in Wyncote. His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election: "There was a young man from the West, / He did what he could for what he thought best; / But election came round; / He found himself drowned, / And the papers will tell you the rest."

In 1895 Pound attended Wyncote Public School, transferring aged 12 to Cheltenham Military Academy, where he wore an American Civil War-style school uniform and was known as Ray or Ra Pound. Specializing in Latin, he was also taught marksmanship, fencing, military drilling, and the importance of submitting to authority. In 1898, aged 13, he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. Pound attended the academy, at times as a boarder, until 1900, but it appears that he did not graduate. He may have attended some other school for the year 1900–1901, possibly Cheltenham Township High School.

University

In 1901, aged 15, Pound was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts. His grades were not particularly good, including in his major subject, Latin; he was given a B in English composition and a pass in English literature. He wrote in "How I Began" (1913), somewhat self-servingly, that this was because he wanted to study only poetry: "I fought every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with 'requirements for degrees'."

At university, when he was 16, Pound met and fell in love with the 15-year-old Hilda Doolittle, who was studying at Bryn Mawr College (she was later known as the poet H.D.). Between 1905 and 1907 he wrote several poems for her, 25 of which he hand-bound and called Hilda's Book, and in 1908 he asked her father, the astronomy professor Charles Doolittle, for permission to marry her, but Doolittle dismissed him as "nothing but a nomad". Pound was seeing two other women at the time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae (1909), to the latter. He asked Moore to marry him too, but she turned him down.

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, after which he transferred, in 1903, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his poor grades. Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some of the courses; according to Pound scholar David Moody, his transcript is short of the required credits. He studied the Provençal dialect with William Pierce Shephard and Old English with Joseph D. Ibbotson. With Ibbotson he read Dante and discussed Sordello, Beowolf, and The Seafarer. From these discussions came the idea for a long poem about history, planting the seeds for The Cantos. It would be in three parts: emotion, instruction, and contemplation.

Postgraduate study

Pound graduated from Hamilton College with a PhB in 1905, then returned to the University of Pennsylvania to study Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert. He obtained an MA in early 1906 and registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays. A two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition fees and gave him a travel grant of $500, which he used to return to Europe. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including one in the royal palace. There, on 31 May 1906, he was standing outside when the attempted assassination of King Alfonso took place, and Pound left the country for fear he would be identified with the anarchists. He spent two weeks in Paris, attending lectures at the Sorbonne, followed by a week in London.

In July 1906 he returned to the United States, where in September his first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in Book News Monthly. He took courses in the English department at Penn in 1907, where he fell out with several lecturers. According to a story Pound told a friend, William Carlos Williams, during lectures on Shakespeare by Felix Schelling, the department head, Pound would wind an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke. In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed. Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and Pound left without finishing his doctorate.

Teaching

I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.

From late 1907 Pound taught Romance languages at Wabash College, a Presbyterian college with 150 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which he called "the sixth circle of hell". He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his office down the corridor from the president's. He annoyed his landlords by entertaining friends, including women, and was forced out of one house after "wo stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with the lady–gent impersonator in my privut apartments", he told a friend. He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 after his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room. Shocked at having been fired, he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March.

London (1908–1920)

A Lume Spento

Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide to American tourists. After stops in Tangiers, Seville, Cadiz, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge, He considered abandoning his efforts to write poetry: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours ..."

In July 1908 he self-published his first collection, the 72-page A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched). The title was from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, which alluded to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. The book was dedicated to his friend, the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, who had recently died of tuberculosis. In an unsigned article in November, Pound reviewed it himself in the London Evening Standard: "Wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic ... words are no good describing it".

Move to London

In August 1908 Pound moved to London, where he lived almost continuously for the next 12 years. English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular with the public. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.

During his travels in Europe in 1906, Pound had met Ann Withey, who ran a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room, and he was able to move in there. He soon moved to cheaper accommodation in Islington (board and lodging, 12s 6d a week), but in or around September, his father sent him ₤4 and he moved back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in the Pisan Cantos (Canto 80/502), "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub".

Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and in December 1908 he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule. After the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic, he acquired a position lecturing in the evenings, from January to February 1909, on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, then lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street. Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":

Pound was a flamboyant dresser at this stage, and had trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend and an immense sombrero. All this was accompanied by a flaming beard cut to a point and a single, large blue earring."

Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae

At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and was introduced to her daughter Dorothy Shakespear, who became Pound's wife in 1914. "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra! And a third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909. She lived with her mother and spent her days reading, painting, and sewing. The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin".

Through the Shakespears, Pound was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. Pound had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming". Pound met the cream of London's literary circle, including George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, Ernest Rhys, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint. He wrote to William Carlos Williams: "Am by the way of falling into the crowd that does things here, London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." The American heiress Margaret Lanier Cravens became a patron; she offered him a large annual sum to allow him to focus on his work. Cravens killed herself in 1912 after the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, married someone else. She may also have been discouraged by Pound's engagement to Dorothy.

"Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

In 1909 Elkin Mathews reprinted A Quinzaine for this Yule, with several additions, as Personae. It became the first of Pound's works to have any commercial success. The poet Edward Thomas wrote in English Review that it was "full of human passion and natural magic". Rupert Brooke was unimpressed, complaining that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them". In September 1909 a further 27 poems appeared as Exultations. Around the same time Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.

In June 1910 Pound returned to the United States; his arrival coincided with the preparation of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from Regent Street Polytechnic. His essays on the United States were written during this period, compiled as Patria Mia, but were not published until 1950. He loved New York but believed the city was threatened by commercialism and vulgarity, and he no longer felt at home there. He found the New York Public Library Main Branch, then being built, especially offensive and, according to Paul L. Montgomery, visited the architects' offices almost every day to shout at them. It was apparently during this period that his antisemitism developed; he referred to Jews in Patria Mia as "detestable", and throughout the 1920s he incorporated antisemitic slurs into his poetry.

Writing for The New Age

Pound persuaded his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, and on 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited the U.S. again. After three days in London he went to Paris, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette in August that year as "affectation combined with pedantry" and a "medley of pretension". When he returned to London in August 1911, A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column. Pound referred to Orage in The Cantos (Possum is T. S. Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, / Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had."

Pound contributed to The New Age from 30 November 1911 until 13 January 1921 and would attend editorial meetings in the basement of the ABC restaurant in Chancery Lane. There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett, Cecil Chesterton, F. S. Flint, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, T. E. Hulme, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells. He met C. H. Douglas in the New Age office in 1918. It was during this period, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury".

Imagism

Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, Doolittle decided to stay on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including the poet Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.

At the museum, Pound met regularly with the curator and poet Laurence Binyon, who introduced him to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts that he used in his later poetry. The museum's visitors' books show Pound in 1912 and 1913 in the Print Room examining Japanese ukiyo-e, some inscribed with Japanese waka verse, a genre of poetry whose economy and strict conventions likely contributed to Imagist techniques of composition.

Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work; he wrote that the "stilted language" of Canzoni had reduced Ford Madox Ford to rolling on the floor with laughter. He realized with his translation work that the problem lay not in his knowledge of the other languages, but in his use of English: "I hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."

According to Pound, while in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon, he, Aldington and Doolittle decided to begin a 'movement' in poetry called Imagism. Imagisme, Pound wrote in Riposte, is "concerned solely with language and presentation". Doolittle and Aldington later said they had no recollection of this discussion or of starting a movement; Pound apparently admitted he had invented the term himself.

The aim, according to Pound, was clarity: a fight against abstraction, romanticism, rhetoric, inversion of word order, and over-use of adjectives. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace", which Pound thought dulled the image by mixing the abstract with the concrete. He wrote that the natural object was always the "adequate symbol". Poets should "go in fear of abstractions", and should not "re-tell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose". Pound described three principles:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

An example is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground, about which he wrote, "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel." He worked on the poem for a year, reducing it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.

Ripostes, Cathay, translations

Published in October 1912, Ripostes begins Pound's shift toward minimalist language. Michael Alexander describes the poems as showing a greater concentration of meaning and economy of rhythm than his earlier work. The volume was published when Pound had just begun his move toward Imagism; his first use of the word Imagiste appears in his prefatory note.

Ripostes includes five poems by Hulme and a translation of the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer. The translation of The Seafarer upset scholars, as would Pound's translations from Latin, Italian, French, and Chinese. Robert Graves wrote in 1955: " knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently." According to Alexander, Pound's translations made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge.

Pound became fascinated by the translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays that he discovered in the papers of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor who had taught in Japan. Fenollosa had studied Chinese poetry under Japanese scholars. In 1913 his widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa, gave his unpublished notes to Pound; she was looking for someone who cared about poetry rather than philology. In 1915 Pound began editing Fenellosa's unfinished essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which he published in 1919 in Little Review.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen, I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

The title page of the collection Cathay (1915) refers to the poet "Rihaku", the pronunciation in Japanese of the Tang dynasty Chinese poet, Li Bai, whose poems were much loved in China and Japan for their technical mastery and much translated in the West because of their seeming simplicity. Alexander thinks this is the most attractive of Pound's work. Chinese critic Wai-lim Yip writes of it that Pound "is able to get into the central concerns of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance."

Marriage, Blast

Ezra and Dorothy met a group of friends for dinner every week in Soho. Iris Barry described Pound's speech: "His is almost a wholly original accent, the base of American mingled with a dozen assorted 'English society' and Cockney accents inserted in mockery, French, Spanish, and Greek exclamations, strange cries and catcalls, the whole very oddly inflected, with dramatic pauses and diminuendos."

In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound (at his suggestion) as foreign correspondent of Poetry, a new magazine she was starting. He submitted poems by H.D., Aldington, and Yeats. In November 1913 Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, and invited Pound to accompany him as his secretary. They stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods and fencing. It was the first of three winters they spent together at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914.

The marriage had proceeded—on 18 April 1914 at the Shakespears' parish church in Kensingston—despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's meager income, earned from contributions to literary magazines. At the time he was earning ₤200 a year; Dorothy's father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had Ezra prepare a statement of his financial position, then and for the future. Dorothy's annual income was £50, aided by £150 from her family. Her parents eventually consented, perhaps out of fear that she was getting older with no other suitor in sight. Ezra's concession to marry in church helped convince them. Afterward he and Dorothy moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, with the newly wed H.D. and Richard Aldington living next door.

Pound wrote for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine Blast, although only two issues were published. An advertisement in The Egoist promised it would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art". Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is ... a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Reacting to the magazine, the poet Lascelles Abercrombie called for the rejection of Imagism and a return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth; Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace".

The publication of Blast was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, then in London to meet the Imagists. But H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he aligned more with Wyndham Lewis's ideas. Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of "dissident" Imagist poets. Upset at Lowell, he began to call Imagisme "Amygism", and in July 1914 he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves Imagists. They dissented, not believing that the movement was Pound's invention, and Lowell eventually Anglicized the term.

World War I, disillusionment

When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for literary articles were immediately reduced. Pound's earned ₤42 over the next year, apparently five times less than the year before. He reportedly tried to join the British Army but was turned down, perhaps because of his nationality.

Between 1914 and 1916 Pound assisted in the serialisation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist, then tried to help have it published in book form. In 1914 he read T. S. Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and persuaded Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, to publish it the following year. " has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own," Pound wrote to Monroe in October 1914. "The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both (most of the swine neither)."

Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. After the publication in 1915 of Cathay, Pound mentioned that he was working on a long poem; in September he described it as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore". In January 1917 he had the first three trial cantos, distilled to one, published in Poetry as Canto I.

Pound was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age as William Atheling and art reviews as B. H. Dias. He also wrote weekly pieces for The Egoist and The Little Review; many of the latter were directed against provincialism and ignorance. The volume of writing exhausted him; he exclaimed that he "must stop writing so much prose". In 1916, when Pound was 30, Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry:

All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned. One must know how to spell his name, and have heard rumors of where he hangs his hat when he eats, and one must have at least passing acquaintance with his solemn denunciados and his blurted quiddities, in order to debate on modern poetry, and in such debate zigzag a course of progress."

In June 1917 the poet Frank Flint told the editor of The Egoist that "we are all tired of Mr. Pound". This was triggered by a suspicion that an article in The Egoist praising Pound had been written by Pound himself. British literary circles were "tired of his antics" and of him "puffing and swelling himself and his friends", Flint wrote. "His work has deteriorated from book to book; his manners have become more and more offensive; and we wish he would go back to America."

In the autumn of 1917 Pound's depression worsened. He blamed American provincialism for the seizure of the October issue of The Little Review. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice applied the Comstock Laws against an article Lewis wrote, describing it as lewd and indecent. Around the same time, T. E. Hulme was killed by shell-fire in Flanders, and Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees. In 1918, after a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish flu, Pound decided to stop writing for The Little Review, mostly because of the volume of work. He asked the publisher for a raise to hire 23-year-old Iseult Gonne as a typist, causing rumors that he was having an affair with her, but he was turned down.

In 1919 Pound published a collection of essays for The Little Review as Instigations, and in the March 1919 issue of Poetry, he published Poems from the Propertius Series, which appeared to be a translation of the Latin poet Sextus Propertius. In his next poetry collection in 1921, he had renamed it Homage to Sextus Propertius in response to criticism of his translation skills. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter from a professor of Latin, W. G. Hale, saying that Pound was "incredibly ignorant" of the language and alluding to "about three-score errors" in Homage. Monroe did not publish Pound's response, which began "Cat-piss and porcupines!!" and continued: "The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation." Moore interpreted Pound's silence after that as his resignation as foreign editor.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

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.

Pound's poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley consists of 18 short parts, and describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless. Published in June 1920, it marked his farewell to London. Stephen J. Adams writes that, just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, Pound denied he was Mauberley. The poem begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary scene, before turning to social criticism, economics, and an attack on the causes of the war; here the word usury first appears in his work. The critic F. R. Leavis described Mauberley as "great poetry".

Pound saw the Vorticist movement as finished and doubted his own future as a poet. He had only the New Age to write for; his relationship with Poetry was finished, The Egoist was running out of money because of censorship problems caused by the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses, and funds for The Little Review had dried up. Other magazines ignored his submissions or refused to review his work. Toward the end of 1920 he and Dorothy resolved to move to Paris. The New Age published Pound's Axiomata statement in January 1921, which included:

(1) The intimate essence of the universe is not of the same nature as our own consciousness.

(2) Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe.

(3) God, therefore exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence ...

Orage wrote in the same issue: "Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. ... has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture, and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ..."

With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends ... Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.

Paris (1921–1924)

Meeting Ernest Hemingway

The Pounds settled in Paris in January 1921 and months later moved to an inexpensive apartment at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting and Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway, then aged 22, moved to Paris in December 1921 with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, including one to Pound. According to Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway first met Pound in Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and in February 1922 the Hemingways visited the Pounds' apartment for tea. Although Pound was 14 years older, the men became friends, living on the same street for a time and touring Italy together in 1923. Hemingway assumed the status of pupil and asked Pound to blue-ink his short stories. Pound introduced Hemingway to his friends and contacts, including Lewis, Ford, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box.

Unlike Hemingway, Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend time at home or in salons. He spent most of his time building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Beach's bookstore, and in 1921 the volume Poems 1918–1921 was published. The following year Eliot sent him the manuscript of The Waste Land, then arrived in Paris to edit it with Pound, who blue-inked the manuscript with comments like "make up yr. mind ..." and "georgian". Eliot wrote: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius."

In 1924 Pound secured funding for Ford Madox Ford's The Transatlantic Review from American attorney John Quinn. The Review published works by Pound, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. It also published several Pound music reviews, later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.

Meeting Olga Rudge

Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the summer of 1922. They were introduced at a salon hosted by the American heiress Natalie Barney at her 300-year-old house at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The two moved in different social circles: Rudge was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while Pound's friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank. They spent the following summer in the south of France, where Pound worked with George Antheil to apply the concept of Vorticism to music and managed to write two operas, including Le Testament de Villon.

Italy (1924–1945)

Birth of the children

The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor. At one Surrealist dinner, a guest had tried to stab him; to Pound this underlined that their time in France was over.

The Pounds decided to move to a quieter place, leaving in October 1924 for the seaside town of Rapallo, Italy. "Italy is my place for starting things", Pound told a friend. Hemingway wrote in a letter that Pound had "indulged in a small nervous breakdown" during the packing, leading to two days at the American Hospital of Paris. During this period the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.

Pregnant by Pound, Olga Rudge followed the couple to Italy, and in July 1925 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary. Rudge placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman whose own child had died, and who agreed to raise Mary for 200 lire a month. Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women. According to Hadley Richardson, he took her aside before she and Hemingway left Paris for Toronto to have their child, telling her: "Well, I might as well say goodbye to you here and now because is going to change you completely."

When Pound told Dorothy about the birth of Mary, she separated from him for much of that year and the next. At the end of December 1925, she went on holiday to Egypt, returning on 1 March. In early June, Pound realized she was pregnant. That month she and Pound left Rapallo for Paris for the premiere of Le Testament de Villon, without mentioning the pregnancy to his parents, although Olivia Shakespear knew about it. They stayed on in the city; Dorothy wanted the baby to be born at the American hospital. Hemingway drove her there for the birth of a son, Omar, on 10 September 1926. Pound signed the birth certificate the following day and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well."

Dorothy took Omar to England, where she stayed for a year, and thereafter visited him every summer. He was sent to live at first in Felpham, Sussex, with a former superintendant of Norland College, which trains nannies, and later became a boarder at Charterhouse. During the summers, when Dorothy was in England, Ezra would spend the time with Olga, whose father had bought her a house in Venice. The arrangement meant that the children were raised very differently. Mary had a single pair of shoes, and books about Jesus and the saints, while Omar was raised to be an English gentleman.

Publishing

In 1925 a new literary magazine, This Quarter, dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. In Hemingway's contribution, "Homage to Ezra", he wrote that Pound "devotes perhaps one fifth of his working time to writing poetry and in this twenty per cent of effort writes a large and distinguished share of the really great poetry that has been written by any American living or dead—or any Englishman living or dead or any Irishman who ever wrote English."

With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.

Against this, Richard Aldington told Amy Lowell that year that Pound had been almost forgotten in England: "as the rest of us go up, he goes down", he wrote. Pound published Cantos XVII–XIX in the winter editions of This Quarter. In March 1927 he launched his own literary magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. It did well in the first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Robert McAlmon; some of the poorest work in the magazine consisted of Pound's rambling editorials on Confucianism or in praise of Lenin, according to biographer J. J. Wilhelm. He continued to work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 he won The Dial's poetry award for his translation of the Confucian classic Great Learning (Dà Xué, transliterated as Ta Hio). That year his parents, Homer and Isabel, visited him in Rapallo, seeing him for the first time since 1914. By then Homer had retired, so they decided to move to Rapallo themselves. They took a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.

Pound began work on The Cantos in earnest after relocating to Italy. The poems concern a descent into hell followed by redemption and paradise. Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell writes that its hundreds of characters were all born in hell and belong to one of three groups: "those who enjoy their hellish state and remain the same"; those who undergo a metamorphosis and, wanting to leave, follow the light; and a few who lead the second group to the land of light, paradiso terrestre. Its composition was difficult and involved several false starts, and Pound abandoned most of his earlier drafts, starting again in 1922. The first three cantos appeared in Poetry in June–August 1917. The Malatesta Cantos appeared in The Criterion in July 1923, and two further cantos were published in The Transatlantic Review in January 1924. Pound published 90 copies in Paris in 1925 of A Draft of XVI. Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book.

Antisemitism, fascism

Anthony Julius writes that Pound's antisemitism was "overt, deep and practical". In 1922 he reportedly disliked that so many Jews were contributing to the magazine The Dial, and in the 1930s it was said he would not enter Frances Steloff's bookshop in New York because she was Jewish, even though she was one of his supporters. When he read his poetry at Harvard, he apparently included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews in the audience. He denied he was an antisemite; he said he liked Spinoza, Montaigne, and Alexander del Mar. "What I am driving at", he wrote in his defense, "is that some kike might manage to pin an antisem label on me IF he neglected the mass of my writing."

Pound came to believe that World War I had been caused by finance capitalism, which he called "usury", and that the solution lay in C. H. Douglas's idea of social credit. He had met Douglas in the New Age offices in London in 1918. Pound wrote over 1,000 letters a year during the 1930s and presented his political ideas and antisemitism in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. From 1932 he wrote 180 articles for The New English Weekly, a new Social Credit journal founded by A. R. Orage, and 60 articles for Il Mare, a Rapallo newspaper. He wrote to Bill Bird to ask about a conspiracy theory that the press in Paris was controlled by an armaments group. He also came under the influence of Charles Maurras, who led a right-wing, antisemitic group in France.

Olga Rudge played for Benito Mussolini in 1927, and on 30 January 1933 Pound met Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome and handed him "A Draft of XXX Cantos". During the meeting, Tytell writes, Pound tried unsuccessfully to present Mussolini with an 18-point digest of his economic ideas. According to Pound, Mussolini called the Cantos "divertente" (entertaining). Pound recorded the meeting in Canto XLI: "'Ma questo' / said the Boss, 'è divertente.'" Pound wrote to C. H. Douglas that he had "never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss".

Ezra Pound reclining, 1939

When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Pound to organize the funeral, where he saw their 12-year-old son Omar for the first time in eight years. He visited Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed for New York, believing he could stop America's involvement in World War II, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini while he lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. In Washington, D.C. he met senators and congressmen and had lunch with the Polish ambassador, warning him not to trust the English or Winston Churchill. In June he received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College.

World War II, writing, radio broadcasts

When war broke out in September 1939, Pound began a letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international banking conspiracy. According to Tytell, in one letter to the American publisher James Laughlin, Pound wrote that "Roosevelt represents Jewry" and signed off with "Heil Hitler". He began calling Roosevelt "Jewsfeldt" or "Stinky Rooosenstein". In The Japan Times, he discussed the "essential fairness of Hitler's war aims", and that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews.'" In Mediridian di Roma, he compared Hitler and Mussolini to Confucius.

In Sir Oswald Mosley's newspaper, Action, Pound wrote that the English were "a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Rothschilds" and that the Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia". By May 1940, according to the historian Matthew Feldman, the British government regarded Pound as "a principal supplier of information to the BUF from abroad".

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your Empire, and you yourselves are (doomed) by the Jew.

Between 23 January 1941 and 28 March 1945, Pound recorded over 300 broadcasts for "The American Hour" on Radio Roma, mostly in English, but also in Italian, German, and French. According to Tytell, the program was transmitted to England, central Europe, and the United States. The Italian government was at first concerned that Pound might be a double agent. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, two years, insistence and wrangling etc., to get hold of their microphone."

Styling himself "Dr Ezra Pound" (his only doctorate was the honorary one from Hamilton College), he attacked the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt's family, Churchill, and the Jews. He praised Hitler's Mein Kampf, recommended eugenics to "conserve the best of the race" rather than commit "race suicide", and said the melting pot in America was "lost". In October 1941 he complained about "Mr. Churchill and that brute, Rosenfeld, and their kike postal spies and obstructors". In a message for New Zealand in 1941, he said: "Your men have been sent to die for the Negus, a black king of a slaving country, that we had started to civilize." He referred to Jews as "filth". On 4 May 1942, during the Holocaust, he broadcast that "the kike is all out for power".

Tytell wrote that Pound's voice had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar". The broadcasts required the Italian government's approval, although Pound often changed the text in the studio. He traveled to Rome one week a month to pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for which he was paid around $17, and they were broadcast every three days. He also wrote scripts and press releases for others. He needed the money. His father's pension payments had stopped arriving—his father died in February 1942—and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after. The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service listening station at Princeton University, and on 26 July 1943 the District Court of the United States for the District of Columbia indicted him in absentia for treason. He defended his right to free speech in a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, which Tytell describes as "long, reasoned, and temperate", and continued to broadcast and write for the fascists until shortly before his arrest on 3 May 1945.

Surrender of Italy

The war years threw Pound's domestic arrangements into disarray. Rudge lost possession of her house in Venice and took a small house with Mary above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio. In 1943 the German military, trying to secure the coast against the Allies, forced Ezra and Dorothy out of their apartment in Rapallo. His mother's apartment was too small for them all, so the couple moved in with Rudge. Pound, as his daughter wrote later, was left "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other." There were food shortages, no coffee, and no newspapers, telephones, or letters.

Pound was in Rome in September 1943 when Italy surrendered and the Germans occupied the city. He borrowed a pair of hiking boots and a knapsack, having finally decided to tell Mary, then 19, about his wife and son. Finished with convent school, Mary was living in Gais (a German-speaking South Tyrolian village in Italy). Heading north, Pound spent a night in an air-raid shelter in Bologna, then took a train to Verona and walked the rest of the way; he apparently traveled over 450 miles (720 km). Mary almost failed to recognize him when he arrived, he was so dirty and tired. He told her everything about his other family.

Arrest for treason

Pound returned home to Rapallo. Mussolini was by then under the control of the Germans. Pound continued writing articles, 35 for Il Popolo d'Italia and more for other fascist publications. In Il Popolo he wrote that it was an eternal law of nature that, as Tytell writes, "the strong shall dominate the weak"; he also discussed the fascist "freedom to express an opinion on the part of those qualified to hold an opinion". His broadcasts continued; he recommended the execution of Galeazzo Ciano, who was on trial for having betrayed Mussolini.

On 3 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was shot, armed Italian partisans arrived at the house to find Pound alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket before he was taken to their headquarters in Chiavari. Released shortly afterwards, he and Rudge gave themselves up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna.

Pound was transferred to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by FBI agent Frank L. Amprin. Amprin confiscated over 7,000 letters, articles, and other documents from Mary's home as evidence. Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to help negotiate peace with Japan. He wanted to make a final broadcast called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover.

On 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered, Pound told an American reporter, Ed Johnston, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint", and that Mussolini was "a very human, imperfect character who lost his head". On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's isolation cells, a series of 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cages, with tar paper covers, lit up at night by floodlights. Engineers reinforced his cage with heavier steel the night before he arrived in case fascist sympathizers tried to break him out.

Pound lived in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication. After three weeks, he stopped eating and began to break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth wrote that Pound recorded it in Canto LXXX, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, after which he was transferred to his own tent. He began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos. The existence of two sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto LXXIV suggests he started it while in the cage.

United States (1945–1958)

St. Elizabeths Hospital

On 18 November 1945, Pound arrived back in Washington, D.C., two days before the start of the Nuremberg trials in Germany. Lt. Col. P. V. Holder, one of the escorting officers, wrote in an affidavit that Pound, was "an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives", and that Pound intended to conduct his own defense. Pound was arraigned in Washington on the 27th of that month on charges of treason. The 19 counts consisted of broadcasts that had been witnessed by two technicians, and the charge was that Pound had violated his allegiance to the United States by unlawfully supporting the Kingdom of Italy.

He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, and in June the following year Dorothy was declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison ward—Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole", a building without windows—in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes to allow the psychiatrists to observe him. Visitors were admitted for 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming and frothing at the mouth.

Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, whose efforts to have him declared insane may have avoided a death sentence, requested his release at a bail hearing in January 1947. The hospital's superintendent, Winfred Overholser, agreed to move him to Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years. The historian Stanley Kutler was given access in the 1980s to military intelligence and other government documents about Pound, including his hospital records. A psychiatrist wrote in 1953 that Pound had a narcissistic personality and was not psychotic; the diagnosis was "Personality trait disturbance, other. Narcissistic personality." Overholser wrote: "In our opinion, one may be incompetent without being technically psychotic." Two years later, the diagnosis was changed to "Psychotic Disorder. Undifferentiated." The file stated that this change had been requested and authorized by Overholser. In Kutler's view, Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was fascinated by him.

Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for, and was allowed to read, write and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day. He turned a small alcove on the ward into his private living room, "Ezuversity", where he entertained friends and important literary figures. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, in 1952 and 1955, and was unable to convince him to be more assertive about his release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has—as he had before—bats in the belfry but it strikes me that he has fewer not more than before his incarceration."

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

is it blacker? was it blacker? Nυξ animae?
Is there a blacker or was it merely San Juan with a belly ache
writing ad posteros
in short shall we look for a deeper or is this the bottom?

James Laughlin had "Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV" ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and gave Pound an advance copy, but he held back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish. A group of Pound's friends—T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Julien Cornell—met Laughlin to discuss how to get him released. They planned to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.

The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro; the latter said he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself. Pound responded to the award with "No comment from the bughouse."

There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry". Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line". Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee. It was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.

Relationships: Mullins and Kasper

Eric Ormsby wrote of Pound's time in hospital: "To the end Pound remained an anti-Semite, but now he added black Americans and civil rights protesters to his roster of well-nurtured hatreds." He often would not talk to psychiatrists with names he deemed Jewish (he called psychiatrists "kikiatrists"), and he apparently told Charles Olson he favored pogroms because of what he was going through in the hospital. He referred to his visitors as Jewish if he happened not to like them, and he advised visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was a focus of his scorn: "the jew book is the poison / that since A.D. has bitched everything it got into." John Tytell writes that Pound nevertheless insisted that he had never been antisemitic.

Pound struck up a friendship with antisemite Eustace Mullins, believed to be associated with the Aryan League of America, and author of the 1961 biography This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound. Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member, who after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) set up the Seaboard White Citizens' Councils. Kasper had come to admire Pound at university; after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the two had become friends. In 1953 Kasper opened a bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, New York, specializing in far-right material, including Nazi and antisemitic literature. Pound's poetry and translations were displayed in the window. Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which—with Pound's cooperation—reprinted Pound's books and others he approved of.

Pound began suggesting anti-desegregation slogans that Kasper could use, and it became increasingly clear that he was schooling Kasper. In January and February 1957, the New York Herald Tribune ran a series of articles on their relationship. One article alleged, as Tytell put it, that some of Kasper's pamphlets "had a distinctly Poundian ring" to them. For example, one flier was modeled on the 1914 Blast manifesto: "JAIL NAACP, alien, unclean, unchristian / BLAST irrelevant ungodly LEADERS". Kasper claimed that desegregation was a Jewish plot; one such speech of his in Clinton, Tennessee, caused a riot, which saw him jailed. He was also questioned about the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville; he had apparently arrived there wanting to know whether any black students had enrolled.

After the New York Herald Tribune articles, the FBI began photographing Pound's visitors. He had conventional visitors too, such as the classicist J. P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out and delayed his release from St. Elizabeths. After his release in 1958, Pound appears to have kept in touch with Kasper; he wrote to Kasper on 17 April 1959: "Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don't play it. ... They RELY ON YOUR PLAYING IT."

New Times articles

Between late 1955 and early 1957, Pound wrote at least 80 unsigned or pseudonymous articles—"often ugly", Swift notes—for the New Times of Melbourne, a newspaper connected to the Social Credit movement. One of Pound's correspondents, Noel Stock, who later became his biographer, worked for the paper and published Pound's articles there. A 24-year-old radio reporter at the time, Stock first wrote to Pound after reading the Pisan Cantos. Pound sent his articles for publication directly to Stock, so that the newspaper's editor may not have realized they had all been written by Pound. Stock sent Pound copies of the published articles, which, Stock wrote, Pound distributed to his followers. Pound contributed similar material to other publications, including Edge, which Stock founded in October 1956. Edge became the magazine of what Stock called the "international Poundian underground".

In the New Times in April 1956, Pound wrote: "Our Victorian forebears would have been greatly scandalized at the idea that one might not be free to study inherited racial characteristics," and "Some races are retentive, mainly of the least desirable bits of their barbaric past." There was a "Jewish-Communist plot", which he compared to syphilis. Equality was dismissed as "anti-biological nonsense". "There were no gas ovens in Italy", he wrote in April 1956; a month later, also in the New Times, he referred to the "fuss about Hitler". On 10 August 1956 in the New Times: "It is perfectly well known that the fuss about 'de-segregation' in the United States has been started by Jews." Instead, America needed "race pride".

Release

Pound's friends continued to try to get him out of St. Elizabeths. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release poets". The poet Archibald MacLeish asked Hemingway in June 1957 to write a letter on Pound's behalf. Hemingway believed Pound would not stop making political and racist statements or forging friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed MacLeish's letters of support anyway and made a pledge of $1,500 to be handed to Pound upon his release. In an interview for the Paris Review in early 1958, Hemingway said that Pound should be released and Kasper jailed.

Several publications began campaigning for Pound's release in 1957. Le Figaro published an appeal titled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths". The New Republic, Esquire, and The Nation followed suit. The Nation argued that Pound was a "sick and vicious old man", but that he had rights. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit stating Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose. The motion was heard on 18 April 1958 by Chief Judge Bolitha Laws, who had committed Pound to St. Elizabeths in 1945. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was discharged on 7 May.

Italy (1958–1972)

Depression

Ezra Pound, 30 June 1958, photographed by Richard Avedon at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey.

"The photograph has a legend behind it. Avedon, they say, stepped up close and raised the camera, and said, 'You know I'm Jewish?' and before Pound could reply he clicked the shutter and froze him like this."

Pound arrived in Naples in July 1958, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press. When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum." On 12 July 1958 he and Dorothy arrived at Schloss Brunnenburg, near Merano in the Province of South Tyrol, to live with Mary where he met his grandson, Walter, and his granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time. Later he returned to Rapallo, where Olga Rudge was waiting to join them.

They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years his junior, ostensibly acting as his secretary and collecting poems for an anthology. The four women soon fell out; Canto CXIII alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness / 3 pains of hell." Pound was in love with Spann, seeing in her his last chance for love and youth. He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast / and to know beauty and death and despair / And to think that what has been shall be, / flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Spann was seen off, sent back to the United States.

By December 1959 Pound was mired in depression. According to the poet and editor Michael Reck, who had visited him several times at St. Elizabeths, Pound was a changed man; he said little and called his work "worthless". In a 1960 interview in Rome with Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." Hall wrote that he seemed fatigued, caused by an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness, abulia, waste". He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life".

Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in mid-1960 Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga Rudge in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. Tytell writes that in 1962 he was photographed at the head of a neo-Fascist May Day parade—500 men wearing boots and armbands, shouting antisemitic slogans, and waving flags with swastikas. His health continued to decline. The following year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi: "I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning."

His friends started dying: Wyndham Lewis in 1957, Ernest Hemingway in 1961 (Hemingway shot himself), E. E. Cummings in 1962, William Carlos Williams in 1963, T. S. Eliot in 1965. Pound went to Eliot's funeral in London and on to Dublin to visit W. B. Yeats' widow (Yeats died in 1939). Two years later he visited New York, where he attended the opening of an exhibition featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land. He went on to Hamilton College and received a standing ovation.

Meeting with Ginsberg, Reck, and Russell

In the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice in 1967, Pound told Allen Ginsberg, the writer Michael Reck, and Peter Russell that his poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through". Reck wrote about the meeting in Evergreen Review the following year. "At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron," Pound had said. "I should have been able to do better."

He had also offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck. When Ginsberg reassured Pound that he had "shown us the way". Pound is said to have replied: "Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things." Reck continues: "Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.'"

Christopher Ricks highlighted Pound's use of the word mistake as "scarcely commensurate with the political and spiritual monstrocity of Pound's antisemitism". Anthony Julius argued that the term suburban was the result of "an arrogance that broods on the descent from an ideal of greatness rather than on the injury which that descent did to others".

Death

Shortly before his death in 1972, it was proposed that Pound be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who explore hate and those who approve it. Two weeks before he died, Pound read for a gathering of friends at a café: "re usury / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is avarice."

On his 87th birthday, 30 October 1972, Pound was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the Civil Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep on 1 November, of septic shock caused by complications from an intestinal blockage, with Olga Rudge at his side. Rudge arranged the funeral, which took place 48 hours later, leaving enough time for her daughter, Mary, to attend, but not enough time for Omar to travel from England. Dorothy was also unable to attend. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed Pound's body to the island cemetery Isola di San Michele, where after a Protestant service he was buried, near Diaghilev and Stravinsky, with other non-Italian Christians. Dorothy Pound died in England the following year, aged 87. Olga Rudge died in 1996, aged 100, and was buried next to Pound.

Style

Overview

Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, 1971

Critics generally agree that Pound was a strong yet subtle lyricist, particularly in his early work, such as "The River Merchant's Wife". According to Witmeyer a modern style is evident as early as Ripostes, and Nadel sees evidence of modernism even before he began The Cantos, writing that Pound wanted his poetry to represent an "objective presentation of material which he believed could stand on its own" without use of symbolism or romanticism.

Drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, Pound intentionally layered often confusing juxtapositions, yet led the reader to an intended conclusion, believing the "thoughtful man" would apply a sense of organization and uncover the underlying symbolism and structure. Ignoring Victorian and Edwardian grammar and structure, he created a unique form of speech, employing odd and strange words, jargon, avoiding verbs, and using rhetorical devices such as parataxis.

Pound's relationship to music is essential to his poetry. Although he was tone deaf and his speaking voice is described as "raucous, nasal, scratchy", Michael Ingam writes that Pound is on a short list of poets possessed of a sense of sound, an "ear" for words, imbuing his poetry with melopoeia. His study of troubadour poetry—words written to be sung (motz et son)—led him to think modern poetry should be written similarly. He wrote that rhythm is "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit". Ingham compares the form of The Cantos to a fugue; without adhering strictly to the traditions of the form, nevertheless multiple themes are explored simultaneously. He goes on to write that Pound's use of counterpoint is integral to the structure and cohesion of The Cantos, which show multi-voiced counterpoint and, with the juxtaposition of images, non-linear themes. The pieces are presented in fragments "which taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as music does".

Imagism and Vorticism

Opinion varies about the nature of Pound's writing style. Nadel writes that imagism was to change Pound's poetry. Like Wyndham Lewis, Pound reacted against decorative flourishes found in Edwardian writing, saying poetry required a precise and economic use of language and that the poet should always use the "exact" word, stripping the writing down to the "barest essence". According to Nadel, "Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ... replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics." Daniel Albright writes that Pound tried to condense and eliminate "all but the hardest kernel" from a poem, such as in the two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro". However, Pound learned that Imagism did not lend itself well to the writing of an epic, so he turned to the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.

Translations

Pound's translations represent a substantial part of his work. He began his career with translations of Occitan ballads and ended with translations of Egyptian poetry. Yao says the body of translations by modernist poets in general, much of which Pound started, consists of some of the most "significant modernist achievements in English". Pound was the first English language poet since John Dryden, some three centuries earlier, to give primacy to translations in English literature. The fullness of the achievement for the modernists is that they renewed interest in multiculturalism, multilingualism, and, perhaps of greater importance, they treated translations not in a strict sense of the word but instead saw a translation as the creation of an original work.

Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a great gift of language and an incisive intelligence. He helped popularize major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu, and brought Provençal and Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the west to classical Japanese poetry and drama. He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics, and helped keep them alive at a time when poets no longer considered translations central to their craft.

In Pound's Fenollosa translations, unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, which tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound created free verse translations. Whether the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Hugh Kenner contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West. Pound scholar Ming Xie explains that Pound's use of language in his translation of "The Seafarer" is deliberate, in that he avoids merely "trying to assimilate the original into contemporary language".

The Cantos

I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
If love be not in the house there is nothing.

Hemingway wrote in 1932: "The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature." Pound himself saw the unfinished 800-page epic as his great failure; he could not "make it cohere".

This lack of form is a common criticism of The Cantos. Pound disregards literary genres, mixing satire, hymns, elegies, essays, and memoirs. The literary critic William Van O'Connor described the work as filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, obscenities of various sorts".

According to Pound scholar Rebecca Beasley, the work amounts to a rejection of the 19th-century nationalistic approach in favor of early-20th-century comparative literature. Pound reaches across cultures and time periods, juxtaposing themes from Homer to Ovid and Dante, from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and many others. The work presents a multitude of protagonists as "travellers between nations", functioning as a memoir in which "personal history lyrical retrospection mingle"—most clearly represented in the Pisan Cantos.

The poet Allen Tate wrote in 1949 that The Cantos are "about nothing at all ... a voice but no subject", with no beginning, middle, or end. He argued that Pound was "incapable of sustained thought in either prose or verse. His acute verbal sensibility is thus at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight', Icarian self-indulgences of prejudice which are not checked by a total view to which they could be subordinated. Thus his anti-Semitism ... is not disciplined by an awareness of its sinister implications in the real world of men."

The work contains several antisemitic passages. Canto 91/XCI, in the section known as Rock-Drill (LXXXV–XCV, 1956), became notorious: "Democracies electing their sewage / till there is no clear thought about holiness / a dung flow from 1913 / and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud / and the american beaneries / Filth under filth, / Maritain, Hutchins, / or as Benda remarked: 'La trahison'." There may also be a reference to the civil rights movement: the phrase "local control of local purchasing power" could refer to Pound's opposition to desegretation in schools in America and his relationship with the white supremacist John Kasper.

Literary criticism and economic theory

Pound's literary criticism and essays are, according to Massimo Bacigalupo, a "form of intellectual journal". In early works, such as The Spirit of Romance and "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris", Pound paid attention to medieval troubadour poets—Arnaut Daniel and François Villon. The former piece was to "remain one of Pound's principal sourcebooks for his poetry"; in the latter he introduces the concept of "luminous details". The leitmotifs in Pound's literary criticism are recurrent patterns found in historical events, which, he believed, through the use of judicious juxtapositions illuminate truth; and in them he reveals forgotten writers and cultures.

Pound wrote intensively about economic theory with the ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini, published in the mid-1930s right after he was introduced to Mussolini. These were followed by The Guide to Kulchur, covering 2500 years of history, which Tim Redman describes as the "most complete synthesis of Pound's political and economic thought". Pound thought writing the cantos meant writing an epic about history and economics, and he wove his economic theories throughout; neither can be understood without the other. In these pamphlets and in The ABC of Reading, he sought to emphasize the value of art and to "aestheticize the political", written forcefully, according to Nadel, and in a "determined voice". In form his criticism and essays are direct, repetitive and reductionist, his rhetoric minimalist, filled with "strident impatience", according to Pound scholar Jason Coats, and frequently failing to make a coherent claim. He rejected traditional rhetoric and created his own, although not very successfully, in Coats's view.

Reception

Early critical reception

In 1922 the literary critic Edmund Wilson reviewed Pound's latest published volume of poetry, Poems 1918–21, writing that Pound's "sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious, he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself ..." According to Wilson, the lines in Pound's poems stood isolated, with fragmentary wording contributing to poems that "do not hang together". Citing Pound's first seven cantos, Wilson dubbed the writing "unsatisfactory". He found The Cantos disjointed and its contents reflecting a too-obvious reliance on the literary works of other authors, and an awkward use of Latin and Chinese translations as a device inserted among reminiscences of Pound's own life.

After the Bollingen Prize in 1949, Pound's friends made every effort to rehabiliate him. James Laughlin's New Directions published his Selected Poems, with an introduction by Eliot, and a censored selection of The Cantos, which omitted the bigotry. Ralph Fletcher Seymour published Patria Mia (1912–1913) to show that Pound was an American patriot. Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound appeared in 1951. New Directions and Faber & Faber published Ezra Pound: Translations in 1953, introduced by Kenner, and the following year Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, introduced by Eliot. Edmund Wilson said the work should "outweigh the tirades of the shrill old small-town crank". In advertisements, magazine articles, and critical introductions, Pound's friends and publishers attributed his antisemitism and fascism to mental illness. The first PhD dissertation on Pound appeared in 1948, and by 1970 there were around ten a year.

Following Eustace Mullins' biography, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (1961), described by Nadel as "partisan" and "melodramatic", was Life of Ezra Pound (1970) by Noel Stock. A former reporter, Stock had corresponded with Pound and published Pound's articles from St. Elizabeth's, including his antisemitism, in the New Times newspaper in Melbourne in the 1950s. Donald Gallup's A bibliography of Ezra Pound (1969) was followed by Kenner's The Pound Era in 1971. Literature professor Betsy Erkkilla writes that no one was more important to Pound's rehabilitation than Hugh Kenner, who visited Pound many times in hospital. The Pound Era effectively equated Pound with modernism.

Ronald Bush's The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (1976) became the first dedicated critical study of The Cantos and was followed by several research editions. In 1971 Caroll F. Terrell at the University of Maine founded the National Poetry Foundation, which focused on Pound, and the following year he founded Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, edited by Kenner and Eva Hesse. Terrell organized conferences on Pound in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990.

1980s and later

Three significant biographies were written in the 1980s: John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987); J. J. Wilhelm's multi-volume biography; and Humphrey Carpenter's 1005-page A Serious Character (1988). David Moody's three-volume biography, Ezra Pound: Poet (2007–2015), was the first to combine biographical narrative with literary criticism.

In the 1980s Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz released the first dual-language edition of The Cantos. The edition includes "Canto LXXII" and "Canto LXXIII", which were first published in fascist magazines; literary scholars describe them as war-time propaganda. Terrell's 791-page A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound appeared in 1980. Ira Nadel's Pound in Context (2010) is a contextual literary approach to Pound scholarship; Pound's life is fully investigated, which Nadel calls "the grid for reading Pound's poetry".

From the late 1980s, scholars examined Pound's antisemitism, fascism, and relationships with the far right in the United States. Studies include Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons (1988); Tim Redman's Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1999); Leon Surette's Pound in Purgatory (1999); Matthew Feldman's Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (2013); and Alec Marsh's John Kasper and Ezra Pound (2015). In Feldman's view, the over 1,500 documents in the "Pound files" held by the FBI, largely ignored by scholars, demonstrate that Pound "was politically cannier, was more bureaucratically involved with Italian Fascism, and was more involved with Mussolini's regime than has been posited".

Legacy

I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak.
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

Much of Pound's legacy lies in his advancement of the careers of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century, particulary between 1910 and 1925. In addition to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndam Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Conrad Aiken, he befriended and helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E. E. Cummings, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, H.D. and Charles Olson.

According to Ira Nadel, Pound "overturned poetic meter, literary style and the state of the long poem". Nadel cited the importance of Pound's editing of The Waste Land, publication of Ulysses, and development of Imagism. Hugh Witemeyer argued that the Imagist movement was the most important in 20th-century English-language poetry, because it affected all the leading poets of Pound's generation and the two generations after him.

Beyond this, his legacy is mixed. In 1944 George Orwell hoped the Americans would not shoot Pound, because it would establish his reputation as a poet before anyone had the chance to determine whether he was any good. Pound's antisemitism and collaboration with fascists became central to an evaluation of his poetry, including whether it was read at all. The outrage over his collaboration was so deep that it has dominated the discussion. According to Arthur Miller, writing in New Masses in December 1945: "A greater calamity cannot befall the art than that Ezra Pound, the Mussolini mouthpiece, should be welcomed back as an arbiter of American letters ..." Against this, Hugh Kenner noted in 1951 that, although there was no great contemporary writer less read than Pound, there was also no one who could appeal through "sheer beauty of language" to people who would rather read poets than talk about them. The critic Macha Rosenthal wrote in 1960 that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant vitality were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound.

Selected works

• 1908 A Lume Spento. Privately printed by A. Antonini, Venice, (poems).
• 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule. Pollock, London; and Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Personae. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Exultations. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1910 The Spirit of Romance. Dent, London, (prose).
• 1910 Provenca. Small, Maynard, Boston, (poems).
• 1911 Canzoni. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems)
• 1912 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti Small, Maynard, Boston, (cheaper edition destroyed by fire, Swift & Co, London; translations)
• 1912 Ripostes. S. Swift, London, (poems; first announcement of Imagism)
• 1915 Cathay. Elkin Mathews, (poems; translations)
• 1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir. John Lane, London, (prose).
• 1916 Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• 1916 Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound: "Noh", or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. Macmillan, London.
• 1916 Lustra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, (translations)
• 1917 Lustra Knopf, New York. (poems). With a version of the first Three Cantos (Poetry, vol. 10, nos. 3, June 1917, 4, July 1917, 5, August 1917).
• 1918: Pavannes and Divisions (prose). Knopf: New York.
• 1918 Quia Pauper Amavi (poems). London: Egoist Press.
• 1919 The Fourth Canto. London: Ovid Press.
• 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. London: Ovid Press.
• 1920 Umbra. London: Elkin Mathews (poems and translations).
• 1920 Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa. Boni & Liveright (prose).
• 1921 Poems, 1918–1921. Boni & Liveright, New York.
• 1922 Remy de Gourmont: The Natural Philosophy of Love. Boni & Liveright, New York (translation).
• 1923 Indiscretions, or, Une revue des deux mondes. Three Mountains Press, Paris.
• 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris, (essays). As: William Atheling.
• 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos. Three Mountains Press, Paris. The first collection of The Cantos.
• 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Boni & Liveright, New York
• 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. John Rodker, London.
• 1928 Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. Faber & Gwyer, London
• 1928 Confucius: Ta Hio: The Great Learning, newly rendered into the American language. University of Washington Bookstore (Glenn Hughes), (translation).
• 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos. Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Paris.
• 1930 Imaginary Letters. Black Sun Press, Paris. Eight essays from the Little Review, 1917–18.
• 1931 How to Read. Harmsworth (essays).
• 1932 Guido Cavalcanti Rime. Edizioni Marsano, Genoa (translations).
• 1933 ABC of Economics. Faber, London (essays).
• 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI–XLI. Farrar & Rinehart, New York (poems).
• 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius. Faber, London (poems).
• 1934 ABC of Reading. Yale University Press (essays).
• 1935 Alfred Venison's Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of Titchfield Street. London: Stanley Nott, Pamphlets on the New Economics, No. 9 (essays).
• 1935 Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London: Stanley Nott (essays).
• 1935 Make It New. London (essays).
• 1935 Social Credit. An Impact. London, (essays). Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 5, London 1951.
• 1936 Ernest Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. London: Stanley Nott.
• 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos. New York: Farrar & Rinehart (poems).
• 1937 Polite Essays. Faber, London (essays).
• 1937 Confucius: Digest of the Analects, edited and published by Giovanni Scheiwiller, (translations)
• 1938 Culture. New Directions. New edition: Guide to Kulchur, New Directions, 1952
• 1939 What Is Money For?. Greater Britain Publications, (essays). Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 3, London: Peter Russell.
• 1940 Cantos LXII–LXXI. New Directions, New York, (John Adams Cantos 62–71).
• 1942 Carta da Visita di Ezra Pound. Edizioni di lettere d'oggi. Rome. English translation, by John Drummond: A Visiting Card, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 4, Peter Russell, London 1952, (essays).
• 1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari, Venice. English translation, by John Drummond: America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 6, Peter Russell, London 1951
• 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari. Venice. English translation An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States, by Carmine Amore. Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, London 1950 (essay)
• 1944 Orientamini. Casa editrice dalla edizioni popolari. Venice (prose)
• 1944 Oro et lavoro: alla memoria di Aurelio Baisi. Moderna, Rapallo. English translation: Gold and Work, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 2, Peter Russell, London 1952 (essays)
• 1948 If This Be Treason. Siena: privately printed for Olga Rudge by Tip Nuova (original drafts of six of Pound's Rome radio broadcasts)
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, (Cantos 74–84)
• 1948 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (includes The Pisan Cantos). New Directions, poems
• 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
• 1950 Seventy Cantos. Faber, London.
• 1950 Patria Mia. R. F. Seymour, Chicago Reworked New Age articles, 1912, '13 (Orage)
• 1951 Confucius: The Great Digest; The Unwobbling Pivot. New Directions (translation)
• 1951 Confucius: Analects (John) Kaspar & (David) Horton, Square $ Series, New York, (translation)
• 1954 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Harvard University Press (translations)
• 1954 Lavoro ed Usura. All'insegna del pesce d'oro. Milan (essays)
• 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares. All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, (poems)
• 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound. Neville Spearman, London, (translation)
• 1957 Brancusi. Milan (essay)
• 1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares. New Directions, (poems)
• 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX–CXVII. New Directions, (poems).

Notes

1. What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary ... You can't go round this sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and another ten to get rid of that education.Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.
2. Like other modernist artists of the period, Pound was inspired by Japanese art, but the aim was to re-make—or as Pound said, "make it new"—and blend cultural styles, instead of copying directly. He may have been inspired by a Suzuki Harunobu print he almost certainly saw in the British Library (Richard Aldington mentions the specific prints he matched to verse), and probably attempted to write haiku-like verse during this period.
3. Cathay was the first of many translations Pound made from the Chinese. He often followed the translations made by Herbert Giles in his History of Chinese Literature, and used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method, which proceeded on Fenollosa's entirely mistaken but fruitful idea that each character represented an image or pictograph, based on sight rather than sound. Steven Yao, scholar of American and Asian literature, sees Cathay as a "major feat"; a work where Pound shows that translation is possible without a thorough knowledge of the source language. Yao does not view Pound's lack of Chinese as an obstacle, and states that the poet's trawl through centuries of scholarly interpretations resulted in a genuine understanding of the original poem. Pound continues to be influential on contemporary Chinese poets such as An Qi, who paid homage to him in her poem Pound or the Rib of Poetry.
4. The Associated Press reported the list of judges as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp, and Robert Penn Warren. Also on the list were Leonie Adams, the Library of Congress's poetry consultant, and Theodore Spencer, who died on 18 January 1949, just before the award was announced.
5. "At their meeting , and to no one's great surprise, given Tate's behind-the-scenes maneuverings and the intimidating presence of recent Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, The Pisan Cantos emerged as the major contender ..."

Sources

Citations

1. The Pisan Cantos (80.665–67), Sieburth (2003), xiii
2. Moody (2007), 4; Ridler, Keith. "Poet's Idaho home is reborn", Associated Press, 25 May 2008; for Idaho Territory, see Wilson (2014), 14.
3. Tytell (1987), 11
4. ^ Moody (2007), xiii
5. Cockram (2005), 238
6. Moody (2007), 4
7. Cockram (2005), 238; Nadel (2007), 1
8. Carpenter (1988), 36
9. Wilhelm (1994), xi
10. ^ Moody (2007), 8
11. Nadel (2007), 2
12. Carpenter (1988), 32–33; Nadel (2007), 2
13. Carpenter (1988), 33–34
14. McDonald (2005), 91
15. Moody (2007), 14
16. Moody (2007), 15–16
17. Moody (2007), 14
18. Tytell (1987), 24–25; Nadel (2004), 18
19. Doolittle (1979), 67–68; Tytell (1987), 26; Nadel (2007), 3
20. Tytell (1987), 28; Nadel (2004), 31; Nadel (2007), 3
21. Tytell (1987), 24–28; for dedication of Personae, see Nadel (1999), xviii
22. Moody (2007), 20
23. Moody (2007), 20–23
24. Tytell (1987), 23
25. Moody (2007), 24
26. ^ Moody (2007), 19, 27–28
27. ^ Tytell (1987), 30
28. Moody (2007), 28–29
29. ^ Moody (2007), 29–31
30. Moody (2007), 29
31. Moody (2007), 58–59
32. Tytell (1987), 34
33. Moody (2007), 60–62; Nadel (2004), 30; Carpenter (1988), 80; Wilhelm (1985), 177
34. Nadel (2004), 33
35. Moody (2007), 62, 63; for the bakery, Tytell (1987), 36
36. Canto LXXVI, quoted in Tytell (1987), 37
37. Moody (2007), 66
38. Tytell (1987), 38
39. Carpenter (1988), 91, 95
40. Tytell (1987), 38–39
41. Knapp (1979), 25–27
42. Wilhelm (2008), 3
43. Wilhelm (2008), 4
44. Wilhelm (2008), 4; Pound (2003), 80, lines 334–336
45. Nadel (2007), 6; Wilhelm (2008), 5–11
46. Wilhelm (2008), 5–11
47. Wilhelm (2008), 7
48. Moody (2007), 113
49. Tytell (1987), 45
50. Tytell (1987), 45
51. Crunden (1993), 272
52. Tytell (1987), 46
53. Tytell (1987), 44–45
54. Tytell (1987), 44
55. For the money from Cravens, see Moody (2007), 124–125; for the speculation that they were lovers, see Carpenter (1988), 155; Dennis (1999), 264; Pound (Omar) and Spoo (1988), 66
56. Tytell (1987), 78
57. Pound (1990), 38
58. Nadel (2007), 6
59. Moody (2007), 91
60. Erkkila (2011), 10
61. Erkkila (2011), 14
62. Wilson (2004)
63. ^ Moody (2007), 180
64. Moody (2017), 123
65. Moody (2017), 117, 125
66. Wilhelm (2008), 62–65
67. ^ Montgomery (1972)
68. Nadel (2007), 121
69. Tytell (1987), 59–62
70. ^ Moody (2007), 150
71. Erkkila (2011), 45
72. ^ Redman (1991), 17
73. Wilhelm (2008), 83, citing Canto 98/685.
74. ^ Preda (2005a), 87
75. Carpenter (1988), between 370 and 371
76. Arrowsmith (2011), 103–164; also see Arrowsmith (2011), 27–42, 118, and Dennis (2000), 101
77. ^ Arrowsmith (2012)
78. Witemeyer (1981), 112.
79. Venuti (1979), 88; Knapp (1979), 54
80. Moody (2007), 180, 222
81. Moody (2007), 180, 222
82. Carpenter (1988), 187
83. Pound (1968), 5
84. Pound (1968), 3.
85. Witemeyer (1981), 34; for its description as the classic Imagist poem, see Witemeyer (1999), 49
86. ^ Alexander (1979), 62
87. Pound (1912); Pound (1918), 4; for publication dates, Pound (2003), 1,239
88. For the original text of The Seafarer, see "The Seafarer", Anglo-Saxons.net; for Pound's, "The Seafarer", University of Toronto.
89. Graves (1955), 138
90. Moody (2007), 239
91. Beasley (2010), 660.
92. Tytell (1987), 124
93. Alexander (1979), 95
94. Alexander (1979), 99, citing Yip, Wai-lim (1969). Ezra Pound's Cathay. Princeton University Press.
95. Kern (1996), 186–189
96. Yao (2010), 36–39
97. Ying (2010), 5
98. Crunden (1993), 272
99. Carpenter (1988), 185
100. Carpenter (1988), 187, 191
101. Moody (2007), 240; Longenbach (1988)
102. Moody (2007), 246
103. ^ Moody (2007), 246–249
104. Tytell (1987), 74
105. Moody (2007), 230, 256
106. Moody (2007), 206
107. Moody (2007), 222–225
108. Tytell (1987), 120–121.
109. Tytell (1987), 123.
110. Carpenter (1988), 226–227, 294, 302.
111. Carpenter (1988), 258, 260–262
112. Carpenter (1988), 258
113. Redman (1991), 27
114. Moody (2007), 306–307
115. Tytell (1987), 71
116. Moody (2007), 330, 334
117. ^ Moody (2007), 342
118. Swift (2017), 3
119. Crunden (1993), 271
120. Moody (2007), 334–335
121. Kenner (1971), 286; Moody (2007), 353
122. Kenner (1971), 286; Moody (2007), 354
123. Pound, Ezra. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", Project Gutenberg, 18 November 2007.
124. Adams (2005), 149
125. Leavis (1942), 150
126. Moody (2007), 394–396
127. Witemeyer (1981), 25–26; Orage (1921), 201
128. ^ Orage (1921), 199–200; Moody (2007), 410
129. Wilhelm (2008), 287.
130. Meyers (1985), 70–74
131. Cohassey (2014), 6
132. Meyers (1985), 73
133. Cohassey (2014), 7–8
134. Meyers (1985), 74–75
135. Meyers (1985), 74
136. Cohassey (2014), 12
137. Bornstein (1999), 33–34
138. Carpenter (1988), 430–431, 448
139. Cohassey (2014), 31
140. Cohassey (2014), 30
141. Tytell (1987), 180; Wilhelm (2008), 251
142. Kenner (1973), 390
143. ^ Tytell (1987), 191–192
144. ^ Tytell (1987), 193
145. Tytell (1987), 197–198; Nadel (2007), 13
146. Baker (1981), 127
147. Tytell (1987), 225
148. Tytell (1987), 198
149. Cohassey (2014), 48
150. Wilhelm (1994), 13–15
151. Carpenter (1988), 448, 450
152. Carpenter (1988), 451
153. Carpenter (1988), 452–453
154. Carpenter (1988), 455–456
155. Carpenter (1988), 554
156. Tytell (1987), 198
157. de Rachewiltz (1971), 1
158. Tytell (1987), 201
159. ^ Hemingway (1925)
160. Nadel (2007), 14
161. Wilhelm (1994), 22–24
162. Nadel (1999), xxi–xxiii
163. Tytell (1987), 215
164. Terrell (1980), viii
165. Terrell (1980), vii
166. Bush (1976), xiii–xv
167. ^ Julius (1995), 182
168. Torrey (1992), 106
169. Tytell (1987), 268–269
170. Julius (1995), 184–185
171. Preda (2005b), 90
172. ^ Tytell (1987), 254; Julius (1995), 183
173. Tytell (1987), 227
174. Tytell (1987), 228
175. Tytell (1987), 228–229; for the date, Feldman (2013), 15
176. ^ Menand (2008)
177. Tytell (1987), 229
178. Tytell (1987), 230
179. Tytell (1987), 250–253
180. Tytell (1987), 254–265
181. Tytell (1987), 257
182. Tytell (1987), 259
183. Tytell (1987), 257, 259
184. Tytell (1987), 254
185. Feldman (2013), 4
186. Pound radio broadcasts, United States Department of Justice, 7.
187. Ellmann, Richard (4 April 1976). "Ezra Pound: The Last Rower". The New York Times; Tytell (1987), 261; that most scholars agree the broadcasts began on 23 January 1941, see Feldman (2013), 94
188. Feldman (2013), 83–84
189. Tytell (1987), 261
190. Tytell (1987), 260
191. Swift (2017), 232
192. Pound radio broadcasts. United States Department of Justice, 12–13.
193. Pound radio broadcasts. United States Department of Justice, 16.
194. Tytell (1987), 262
195. Feldman (2013), 82
196. Tytell (1987), 266
197. Pound radio broadcasts. United States Department of Justice, 11.
198. Tytell (1987), 266
199. Tytell (1987), 261, 264
200. Tytell (1987), 263–264
201. Tytell (1987), 269; for free speech, 270
202. Tytell (1987), 273–274; Gill (2005), 115–116; Sieburth (2003), ix–xiv
203. Sieburth (2003b), xiv
204. Gery (2010), 222
205. ^ Tytell (1987), 272
206. ^ Tytell (1987), 273
207. Tytell (1987), 274
208. Sieburth (2003), ix–xiv; Tytell (1987), 276
209. Sieburth (2003), xxxvi
210. Tytell (1987), 276
211. Tytell (1987), 276; Sieburth (2003b), xii
212. Sieburth (2003b), x
213. Sieburth (2003b), xi
214. ^ Tytell (1987), 277
215. Sieburth (2003b), xiii
216. Sieburth (2003b), xiv
217. Sieburth (2003b), xv
218. Kimpel and Eaves (1981), 474
219. Tytell (1987), 284
220. Kimpel and Eaves (1981), 475–476
221. Tytell (1987), 286–287
222. ^ Tytell (1987), 297
223. Tytell (1987), 294
224. "Julien Cornell, 83, The Defense Lawyer In Ezra Pound Case", The New York Times, 7 December 1994.
225. Mitgang (1981)
226. Kutler (1982), 78
227. Kutler (1982), 79
228. Kutler (1982), 73
229. Tytell (1987), 309, 320
230. Tytell (1987), 305
231. ^ Tytell (1987), 293, 302–303; McGuire (1988).
232. "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell". Associated Press, 19 February 1949.
233. Sieburth (2003b), xxxviii–xxxix
234. Hillyer (1949); McGuire (1988)
235. Ormsby (2017)
236. Cohassey (2014), 142
237. Tytell (1987), 303–304
238. Wilhelm (1994), 286, 306
239. Tytell (1987), 306; Barnhisel (1998), 283
240. Tytell (1987), 306
241. Swift (2017), 198
242. Tytell (1987), 307; Hickman (2005), 127
243. Tytell (1987), 307; Barnhisel (1998), 276ff
244. Moody (2017), 379
245. ^ Tytell (1987), 308
246. Barnhisel (1998), 287–288; Moody (2017), 378
247. ^ Tytell (1987), 306
248. Bird, Robert S. (31 January 1957). "Pound's Ideology Permeates Kasper Speeches, Writing". The Nashville Banner. New York Herald Tribune News Service. p. 3.
249. Tytell (1987), 308; Carpenter (1988), 829; Webb (2011), 88–89
250. "Police Firmness in Nashville". Life magazine. 23 September 1957, 34
251. Barnhisel (1998), 288
252. Tytell (1987), 308; Wilhelm (1994), 286
253. Carpenter (1988), 829; Marsh (2015), 229
254. Stock (1970), 442–443
255. Swift (2017), 27, 199; Stock (1970), xiii, 443
256. ^ Carpenter (1988), 815
257. ^ Stock (1970), 443
258. Swift (2017), 199
259. Stock (1970), xiii, 443
260. ^ Swift (2017), 200
261. Swift (2017), 218
262. "Books: An American Storyteller". Time magazine, 13 December 1954, 6/11
263. Reynolds (2000), 305
264. Plimpton (1958)
265. Tytell (1987), 322
266. Tytell (1987), 325; Lewis (1958)
267. Tytell (1987), 325–326
268. Swift (2017), 27
269. "Ezra Pound", The Richard Avedon Foundation.
270. Swift (2017), 251
271. "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum'". The New York Times, 10 July 1958.
272. Moody (2015), xxxvii
273. ^ Tytell (1987), 328–332; for the reference to "Canto 113", see Sieburth (2003a), xl
274. Tytell (1987), 347
275. ^ Reck (1986)
276. Reck (1968), 27
277. Tytell (1987), 333; Hall (1962)
278. Tytell (1987), 334–335
279. Tytell (1987), 335
280. Tytell (1987), 335
281. ^ Nadel (2007), 18
282. Tytell (1987), 337
283. Reck (1968), 28–29, 84.
284. Reck (1968), 29; Carpenter (1988), 898–899
285. Ricks (1988), 54
286. Julius (1995), 185.
287. Tytell (1987), 337–338
288. Tytell (1987), 339
289. Swift (2017), 244
290. Tytell (1987), 339; Cohassey (2014), 162
291. "Ezra Pound Dies in Venice at Age of 87". The New York Times, 2 November 1972.
292. "Photograph of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound". Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
293. O'Connor (1963), 7, 19
294. ^ Nadel (1999), 1–6; Witmeyer (1999), 47
295. Coats (2009), 87–89
296. Stark (2001) 10–12
297. ^ Ingham (1999), 236–237
298. Pound (1968), 103
299. Ingham (1999), 244–245
300. Oliver (2011), 87
301. ^ Albright (1999), 60
302. Yao (2010), 34–35
303. Yao (2010), 33–36
304. Alexander (1997), 23–30
305. ^ Xie (1999), 204–212
306. Kenner (1971), 199
307. Hemingway (2006), 25
308. Nicholls (1999), 144
309. Nadel (1999), 8
310. ^ Nadel (1999), 1–6
311. O'Connor (1963), 7
312. Beasley (2010), 662
313. Tate (1955), 264–265
314. Houen (2010), 399; Wilhelm (2010), 247, citing Canto 91, 613–614
315. Houen (2010), 399, citing Canto 96, 669
316. Bacigalupo (1999), 188–191
317. Bacigalupo (1999), 203
318. Redman (1999), 258
319. Redman (1999), 255–260
320. Nadel (1999), 10
321. Bacigalupo (1999), 203; Coats (2009), 80, 83
322. Wilson (2007), 44, 45
323. Barnhisel (1998), 273–274; Erkkila (2011), xlvii
324. Erkkila (2011), xlvii
325. Barnhisel (1998), 273–274
326. ^ Erkkila (2011), xlviii
327. ^ Nadel (2010b), 162–165
328. Swift (2017), 199
329. ^ Nadel (1999), 12
330. ^ "Carroll Franklin Terrell '38". Bowdowin magazine, undated.
331. ^ Nadel (1999), 13
332. Feldman (2012), 94
333. Nadel (2010a), 1–6
334. Coats (2009), 81
335. Feldman (2012), 90–91
336. Bornstein (1999), 22–23
337. Moody (2007), 129
338. Witemeyer (1999), 48
339. Orwell (2000), 85
340. Bigsby (2009), 252
341. Kenner (1985), 16
342. Rosenthal (1960), 2
343. Translated into French by Margaret Tunstill and Claude Minière Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Tristram éd., Auch, France, 1992.
344. Ackroyd (1980), 121. For early publications, see Eliot (1917), 29–31.

Works cited

• Ackroyd, Peter (1980). Ezra Pound. Thames and Hudson Ltd..
• Adams, Stephen J. (2005). "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley". In Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Albright, Daniel (1999). "Early Cantos: I–XLI", in Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Alexander, Michael (1979). The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-0981-9
• Alexander, Michael (1997). "Ezra Pound as Translator". Translation and Literature. 6(1).
• Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard (2011). Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959369-9
• Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard (March 2012). "Cosmopolitanism and Modernism" (video lecture discussing the importance of Japanese culture to Pound's early poetry). Directors' Seminar Series.
• Baker, Carlos (1981). Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-16765-7
• Bacigalupo, Massimo (1999.) "Pound as Critic". In Ira Nadel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Barnhisel, Greg (September 1998). "'Hitch Your Wagon to a Star': The Square Dollar Series and Ezra Pound". The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 92 (3): 273–295. JSTOR 24304448.
• Beasley, Rebecca (2010). "Pound's New Criticism". Textual Practice. 24(4), 649–668. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2010.499652
• Bigsby, C. W. E. (2009). Arthur Miller, 1915-1962. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674035058.
• Bornstein, George (1999). "Pound and the making of modernism". In Ira B. Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 22–42. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Carpenter, Humphrey (1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 978-0-395-41678-5
• Coats, Jason M. (2009). ""Part of the War Waste": Pound, Imagism, and Rhetorical Excess". Twentieth Century Literature. 55(1).
• Cohassey, John (2014). Hemingway and Pound: A Most Unlikely Friendship. New York: McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786476400
• Cockram, Patricia (2005). "Pound, Isabel Weston". In Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Dennis, Helen May (1999). "Pound, Women and Gender". In Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Dennis, Helen May (2000). Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. 51. ISBN 978-90-420-1523-4
• Doolittle, Hilda (1979). End to Torment. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8112-0720-1
• Eliot, T. S. (1917). Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Erkkila, Betsy (ed.) (2011). Ezra Pound: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-40139-5
• Feldman, Matthew (2012). "The 'Pound Case' in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview". Journal of Modern Literature. 35(2).
• Feldman, Matthew (2013). Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-34550-9
• Ford, Ford Madox (1999). Return to Yesterday. Manchester: Carcanet Press (first published 1931). ISBN 978-1-8575-4397-1
• Gery, John (2010). "Venice". In Ira Nadel (ed.). Ezra Pound in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Gill, Jonathan (2005). "Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches on World War II", in Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Graves, Robert (1 April 1955). "These Be Your Gods, O Israel!" Essays in Criticism. V(2), 129–150. doi:10.1093/eic/V.2.129
• Hall, Donald (Summer–Fall 1962). "Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5". The Paris Review. 28.
• Hall, Donald (1992). Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-89919-979-5
• Haller, Evelyn (2005). "Mosley, Sir Oswald". In Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Hemingway, Ernest (Spring 1925). "Homage to Ezra". This Quarter. 1, 221–225.
• Hemingway, Ernest. Bruccoli, Matthew and Baughman, Judith (eds.) (2006). Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-599-9
• Hickman, Miranda B. (2005). The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-70943-0
• Hillyer, Robert (11 June 1949). "Treason's Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award". The Saturday Review of Literature. xxxii/24, 9–11, 28.
• Houen, Alex (2010). "Antisemitism". In Ira B. Nadel (ed.). Ezra Pound in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Ingham, Michael (1999). "Pound and Music". In Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Julius, Anthony (1997) . T. S. Eliot, anti-semitism, and literary form. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58673-9
• Kenner, Hugh (ed.) (1985) . The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-7756-4
• Kenner, Hugh (1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02427-4
• Kern, Robert (1996). Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-49613-1.
• Kimpel, Ben D. and Eaves, T. C. Duncan (November 1981). "More on Pound's Prison Experience". American Literature. 53(1), 469–476. JSTOR 2926232
• Knapp, James F. (1979). Ezra Pound. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7286-9
• Kutler, Stanley I. (1983). American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War. New York: Hill & Wang.
• Leavis, F. R. (1942). New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus.
• Lewis, Anthony (14 April 1958). "U.S. asked to end Pound indictment". The New York Times.
• Longenbach, James (10 January 1988). "The Odd Couple: Pound and Yeats Together". The New York Times.
• Marsh, Alec (2015). John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic. London and New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4725-0886-7.
• McGuire, William (1988). Poetry's Catbird Seat. Washington: Library of Congress. ISBN 0-8444-0586-8
• Menand, Louis (9 June 2008). "The Pound Error". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 3 October 2014.
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-42126-0
• Mitgang, Herbert (31 October 1981). "Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's 'insanity'". The New York Times.
• Moody, A. David (2007). Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. I: The Young Genius 1885–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957146-8
• Moody, A. David (2015). Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. III: The Tragic Years 1939–1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-870436-2
• Montgomery, Paul L. (2 November 1972). "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 September 2019.
• Nadel, Ira (1999). "Introduction". In Ira Nadel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Nadel, Ira (2004). Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-58257-2
• Nadel, Ira (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85391-0
• Nadel, Ira (2010a). "Introduction". in Ira Nadel (ed.) Ezra Pound in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Nadel, Ira (2010b). "The Lives of Pound". In Ira Nadel (ed.). Ezra Pound in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Nicholls, Peter (1999). "Beyond the Cantos: Ezra Pound and recent American poetry". In Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• O'Connor, William Van (1963). Ezra Pound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Orage, A. R. (1921). "A. R. Orage on Pound's Departure from London". In Eric Homberger (ed.). Ezra Pound. Routledge. First published as R.H.C. . "Readers and Writers". New Age. 31 January 1921, xxviii, 126–127.
• Ormsby, Eric (7 July 2017). "Bedlam salon". Times Literary Supplement.
• Orwell, George (1968) . "The Question of the Pound Award". In Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Ian (eds.). George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950. Volume IV. New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 490–491. ISBN 0-15-618623-3
• Orwell, George (2000) . "As I Please". In Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Ian (eds.). As I Please 1943–1946. Volume 3. Boston: David R. Godine, 84–85. ISBN 1-56792-135-3
• Plimpton, George (Spring 1958). "Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21". Paris Review (18). Archived from the original on 13 January 2013.
• Pound, Ezra (1912). Ripostes. London: Stephen Swift & Co Ltd.
• Pound, Ezra (1968) . "A Retrospect". In T. S. Eliot (ed.). Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions Publishing.
• Pound, Ezra (1983). The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions Books.
• Pound, Ezra (1990). Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walter Litz. New York: New Directions Publishing.
• Pound, Ezra (2003). Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America. ISBN 978-1931082419
• Pound, Ezra (2006). "The Fifth Decade of Cantos" (translated into Italian by Mary de Rachewiltz). Rimini: Raffaelli. ISBN 978-88-89642-19-1
• Pound, Omar and Spoo, Robert (eds.) (1988). Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910–1912. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-0862-1
• Preda, Roxana (2005a). "Economics". In Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.). The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 87–89. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Preda, Roxana (2005b). "Economics: Usury". In Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 89–90. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Rachewiltz, Mary de (1971). Discretions: A memoir by Ezra Pound's daughter. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1647-0
• Reck, Michael (June 1968). "A Conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg". Evergreen Review. 12 (55): 27–29, 84.
• Reck, Michael (9 October 1986). "An Exchange on Ezra Pound". The New York Review of Books.
• Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37305-0
• Redman, Tim (1999). "Pound's politics and economics", in Ira Nadel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 249–263. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Reynolds, Michael (2000) . Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-04748-2
• Ricks, Christopher (1988). T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06578-6
• Rosenthal, M. L. (1960). A primer of Ezra Pound. New York: Macmillan. OCLC 923695879
• Sieburth, Richard (2003a). Poems and Translation. New York: The Library of America. ISBN 978-1-931082-42-6
• Sieburth, Richard (2003b). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1558-9
• Sieburth, Richard (2010). New Selected Poems and Translation. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1733-0
• Stoicheff, Peter (1995). The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound's Cantos. University of Michigan Press.
• Stock, Noel (1970). The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books. OCLC 911707588
• Stark, Robert (2001). "Pound Among the Nightingales – From the Troubadours to a Cantible Modernism". Journal of Modern Literature. 32(2).
• Surrette, Leon (1999). Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-02498-6
• Swift, Daniel (2017). The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-28404-6
• Tate, Allen (1955). "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize", in Allen Tate (ed.). The Man Of Letters In The Modern World. New York: Meridian Books, 264–267.
• Terrell, Carroll F. (1980). A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03687-1
• Torrey, Edwin Fuller (1984). The Roots of Treason and the Secrets of St Elizabeths, New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-064983-5
• Tytell, John (1987). Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-19694-6
• Venuti, Lawrence (2004). The Translation Studies Reader, London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-31919-5
• Webb, Clive (2011). Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Wilhelm, J. (1985). The American Roots of Ezra Pound. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. ISBN 978-0-8240-7500-2
• Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-2-7101-0827-6
• Wilhelm, James J. (2008). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-02798-2
• Wilson, Peter (2014) . A Preface to Ezra Pound. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-582-25867-9
• Wilson, Peter (20 April 2004). "Exultations", The Literary Encyclopedia.
• Wilson, Edmund (2007) . "Ezra Pound's Patchwork". Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s. Library of America. ISBN 978-1598530131
• Witemeyer, Hugh (1981) . The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04515-7
• Witemeyer, Hugh (ed.) (1996). Pound/Williams: Selected letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1301-1
• Witemeyer, Hugh (1999). "Early Poetry 1908–1920", in Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Yao, Steven G. (2010). "Translation", Ira B. Nadel (ed.) in Ezra Pound in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Xie, Ming (1999). "Pound as Translator". in Ira Nadel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Ying, Li-hua (2010). "An Qi". Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature. The Scarecrow Press.

Further reading

External links

• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• The Ezra Pound Society.
• Works by or about Ezra Pound at the Internet Archive.
• Works by Ezra Pound at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) .
• Ezra Pound papers; photographs; and William Bird Ezra Pound papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University.
• Frequently requested records: Ezra Pound. United States Department of Justice.
• "Selected World War II Broadcasts". Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Records of Ezra Pound. Simon Fraser University.
• Ezra Pound collection, 1911–1920. Emory University.
• Ezra Pound papers, 1915–1959. Columbia University.
• "Poems and Translations". Library of America.

Articles

• Campbell, James (17 May 2008). "Home from home". The Guardian.
• Ellison, Michael (27 October 1999). "Jew-hating Ezra Pound barred from poets' corner". The Guardian.
• Hitchens, Christopher (April 2008). "A Revolutionary Simpleton". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 6 September 2020.
• James, Clive (4 December 2007). "The Arrow Has Not Two Points". Poetry. Archived from the original on 29 August 2020.
• Kindley, Evan. "The Insanity Defense: Coming to terms with Ezra Pound's politics". The Nation.
• Mertens, Richard (April 2001). "Letter by letter". University of Chicago Magazine.
• Montgomery, Paul L. (2 November 1972). "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions". The New York Times.
• "Canto Controversy". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 August 1949.

Audio/video

• Ezra Pound recordings. University of Pennsylvania.
• "The Four Steps". BBC Home Service, 21 June 1958.
• Hammer, Langdon (February 2007). Lecture on Ezra Pound. Yale University.

Books

• Aldington, Richard; Doolittle, Hilda (2003). Caroline Zilboorg (ed.). Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters. New York: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0719059728.
• Casillo, Robert (1988). The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0810107106
• Doob, Leonard (1978). 'Ezra Pound Speaking': Radio Speeches of WWII. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 9780313200571.
• Eliot, T. S. (1917). Ezra Pound: His Metric and his Poetry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf OCLC 1131624479

v t e Vorticism
Vorticists	Lawrence Atkinson David Bomberg Jessica Dismorr Jacob Epstein Frederick Etchells Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Cuthbert Hamilton Kate Lechmere Wyndham Lewis Ezra Pound William Roberts Helen Saunders Dorothy Shakespear Edward Wadsworth
Output	Blast (1914–1915) The Crowd (1914–1915) Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914) The Mud Bath (1914) Rock Drill (1913)
Works about	The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (1962 painting)

• Ezra Pound
• 1885 births
• 1972 deaths
• 20th-century American poets
• 20th-century translators
• American anti-communists
• American classical composers
• American collaborators with Fascist Italy
• American collaborators with Nazi Germany
• American conspiracy theorists
• American expatriates in England
• American expatriates in France
• American expatriates in Italy
• American fascists
• American male classical composers
• American male non-fiction writers
• American modernist poets
• American opera composers
• American pamphleteers
• American people of English descent
• American social crediters
• American translators
• Anti-Masonry
• Antisemitism in Italy
• Antisemitism in the United States
• Bollingen Prize recipients
• Burials at Isola di San Michele
• Chinese–English translators
• Deaths from digestive disease
• English-language poets
• Fascist writers
• Hamilton College (New York) alumni
• Imagists
• Male opera composers
• Old Right (United States)
• People associated with James Joyce
• People associated with W. B. Yeats
• People declared mentally unfit for court
• People from Cheltenham, Pennsylvania
• People from Hailey, Idaho
• People of the Italian Social Republic
• People with narcissistic personality disorder
• Propagandists
• Self-published authors
• Translators to English
• University of Pennsylvania alumni
• Vorticists
• Wabash College faculty
• Wadsworth family
• Writers from Idaho
• Writers from Philadelphia