Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30,
1885 – November 1, 1972) was
an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of
the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally
considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist
aesthetic in poetry.
In the early teens of the twentieth
century, he opened a fruitful exchange of work and ideas between British and
American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the
work of such major contemporaries as Robert Frost, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, and
especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on the Irish
writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promotion
of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and
economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in
Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
sequence of the metronome." His later work, spanning nearly fifty years,
focused on his epic poem The Cantos.
Early
life
Pound
was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound.
His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, Thaddeus C.
Pound;[2] his mother was said to be related to the poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the suburbs
of Philadelphia. In 1901 at the age of 15, he entered the University of
Pennsylvania, but after studying there for two years transferred to Hamilton
College, where he received his Ph.B. in 1905. He then returned to Penn,
completing an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a short time. Afterward, Pound
taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, but when he allowed a
stranded actress to spend the night in his room, the resulting scandal caused
him to leave his teaching post after only four months, "all accusations", he
later claimed, "having been ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin
Quarter type'".[3] He had been taken to Europe by relatives in 1898 and again
to Europe and Morocco in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, living first in
Venice but eventually settling in London after spending a brief stint working
as a tour guide in Gibraltar. Pound self-published A Lume Spento, his first
published collection of short poems, while living in Venice.
London
Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and
other 19th-century poets, medieval Romance literature (especiallyProvençal)
and the neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy of that period. After he
moved to London, the influence of Ford Madox Ford andT. E. Hulme encouraged
him to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms and begin to remake
himself as a poet. Pound believed thatWilliam Butler Yeats was the greatest
living poet, and befriended him in England.[5] He eventually became Yeats's
secretary, and soon became mildly interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During
1914 and 1915 Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex,
England, studyingJapanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular
attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan
whose work on Chinese characters fascinated Pound. Eventually, Pound used
Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the Ideogrammic
Method. On April 20, 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist and
daughter of the novelist Olivia Shakespear, a former lover of Yeats.
In the years before the World War I, Pound was largely responsible for the
appearance of Imagism, and coined the name of the movementVorticism, which was
led by his friend Wyndham Lewis, and which included the artists Edward
Wadsworth, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound contributed to
Lewis' short-lived literary magazine BLAST whose two numbers appeared in 1914
and 1915. These two movements, Imagism and Vorticism, can be seen as central
events in the birth of English-language modernism. They helped bring to notice
the work of such poets and artists as James Joyce, Lewis, William Carlos
Williams, H.D., Jacob Epstein, Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore,Rabindranath
Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Later, Pound
also edited his friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to
force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that he described as
"For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po), from the notes of the
late Ernest Fenollosa, and the deciphering of the professors Mori and Ariga".[6] The
volume includes works such as The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter and A Ballad
of the Mulberry Road. Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry,
who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered
readers free verse translations celebrated for their ease of diction and
conversationality. Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most
successful realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether the poems are
valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy,
although Arthur Waley found them to be beautiful paraphrases. Neither Pound
nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been
criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no basis in
the original texts, though many critics argue that the fidelity of Cathay to
the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter "The
Invention of China" from The Pound Era, 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".[7]These ostensible
translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments
in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.
The first World War had a profound effect on many writers and poets of that
period.The Great Warshattered
Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon
after, but not before he publishedHomage
to Sextus Propertius(1919) andHugh
Selwyn Mauberley(1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's
London career,The Cantos,
which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.
Paris
In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, where he moved among a circle of artists,
musicians, and writers who were revolutionizing the whole world of modern art.
He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand
Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was also good
friends withBasil Bunting and Ernest Hemingway, whom Pound asked to teach him
to box. (Hemingway would later write, in A Moveable Feast: "I was never able
to teach him to throw a left hook.") He continued working on The Cantos,
writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence", which introduced one of the
major personas of the poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations
with politics and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose
and translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George
Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became
involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they
formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's
life.[citation needed]
Italy
On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris
permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. Near neighbours were Max Beerbohm and
his wife Florence Kahn. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on
to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925.[8] In
Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came
to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve,
and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also
inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which
would become a vehicle for many new authors.
At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo,
where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In
particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of
interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. Pound also became
alarmed at the importation taxes levied by the United States on what Pound
believed to be works of art.[9] In addition to lobbying the US Customs and
the House of Representatives, Pound wrote an essay in 1928 entitled "Article
211", where he related a trial to the recent decision to categorise the Nassak
Diamond as a work of art, and therefore let it into the United States without
payment of an import duty.
In 1933, he had a personal audience with Italy's prime minister Benito
Mussolini and presented him with A Draft of XXX Cantos. Mussolini's response
was: "How amusing." Later, Pound would be asked to make radio broadcasts from
Rome. In a radio broadcast in June 1942 he would say "Every man of common
sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man of common sense
prefers Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he learns a few concrete
facts about both of them."
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Pound made his first trip back home to
the U.S. in many years. He considered moving back permanently, but in the end
he chose to return to Italy. Pound also had personal reasons for staying in
Italy. His elderly parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in
poor health and would have difficulty making the trip back to America even
under peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his
mistress Olga Rudge: Mary Rudge was a young woman in her late teens who had
lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had difficulty relocating to
America (even though she had American as well as Italian citizenship).
Pound remained in Italy, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of
World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States
formally entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. He made several
radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also
continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper
pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his
scant political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. When Pound spoke on
Italian radio, he gave a series of talks on political and cultural matters,
art and patronage and economic theories. Pound believed that economics was the
core issue for the cause of World War II. Specifically, his talks were largely
about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by
bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence ofcentral banks,
which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own
money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of
thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media
outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound believed
that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he
touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the
war.[11] In addition, various comments of his were considered anti-semitic.
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard Pound's
radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and
unreliable, though obviously his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a
number of pamphlets) were read in Italy. However, according to his
biographer Humphrey Carpenter, the broadcasts were "a masterly performance".
Carpenter wrote "Certainly there were Americans who, in 1941, would have
agreed with virtually every word Ezra said at the microphone about the United
States Government, the European conflict, and the power of the Jews."[13] The
broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the
United States government, and transcripts, now stored in the Library of
Congress, were made of them. Pound was indicted for treason by the United
States government in 1943.[citation needed]
Mugshot of Pound in U.S. Army detention camp
After Allied forces had landed in Sicily and began to overrun the southern
part of Italy in July, 1943, Mussolini was dismissed by King Victor Emmanuel
III and interned at the mountain resort of Gran Sasso. Two months later,
Mussolini was freed by German troops and relocated to the north, where
a Fascist Republic was established.
Pound also moved northwards[14] On May 3, 1945, as Mussolini's puppet regime
tumbled, Pound was arrested by partisans and taken (according to Hugh Kenner)
"to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no
interest." At his request, he was then brought to the U.S. command in Lavagna,
whence he was driven to the C.I.C. in Genoa. On May 24 he was transferred from
Genoa to a United States Armydetention camp north of Pisa. He spent 25 days in
an open cage before being given a tent, and appears to have suffered a nervous
breakdown. He drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work
in progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and
Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the
first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1949.
Partisan Review in April 1949 asked several writers to discuss the issues
connected with the award. English journalist, novelist and essayist George
Orwell, a close observer of the events of the time, wrote, "Pound was an
ardent follower of Mussolini as far back as the nineteen-twenties and never
concealed it.[...] I should say that his enthusiasm was essentially for the
Italian form of Fascism. He did not seem to be very strongly pro-Nazi or
anti-Russian, his real underlying motive being hatred of Britain, America and
'the Jews'.[...] I remember at least one [broadcast] in which he approved the
massacre of the East European Jews and 'warned' the American Jews that their
turn was coming presently.[...] None of this is a reason against giving Pound
the Bollingen Prize."[16]
St. Elizabeths
After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges
of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time
when Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before
the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not
prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Salò Republic,
evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by
the United States. He was found incompetent to face trial by a special federal
jury[17] and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he
remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. Invited by Canadian producer Patrick
Watson to be interviewed on the CBC TV magazine "Close-Up,", in 1957, he wrote
Watson: "Elementary my dear Watson: Just get Grandpa out of Quad and we can
talk turkey." The interview was never done.
His insanity plea is still a matter of controversy, since in retrospect his
activities and his writings during the war years do appear to be those of a
sane person.
E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was given special treatment by colluding
authorities, specifically Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St.
Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed
him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote books, received
visits from literary figures and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife. The
reliability of Torrey's allegations has been questioned; other scholars have
presented Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient,
without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound continued
working on The Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics.
Pound was frequently visited by a Library of Congress researcher named Eustace
Mullins. Pound commissioned Mullins to write a book about the history of
the Federal Reserve and to tell it like a detective story. Pound believed that
the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank
of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World
Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels
(the national debt indeed rose astronomically because of the wars). He
advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by
private bankers. He favored government issued currency[20] with no interest to
pay, preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the
system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764.[citation
needed] Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of Thomas
Jefferson, as well as withBenjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.
Pound was also befriended at St. Elizabeths by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry
of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a reassessment of
Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the Pound Newsletter, which
eventually led to the publication of the first guide to The Cantos, Annotated
Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound had many friends and admirers
among his fellow poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to
Pound's situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeth's", and Robert Lowell,
who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. The artist Sheri
Martinelli, meanwhile, is believed to have inspired the love poetry in Cantos
XC–XCV. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky were among Pound's
visitors, as was Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote
his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in
1983).
Pound's other visitors included the Colonial French nonfigurative painter René
Laubies, the first translator of the work of Pound into French (Cantos et
poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound, Paris: P.J. Oswald, 1958. 77 pages). In
his Portraits et Aphorismes (2001) Laubies writes that he did not remember
having any "difficulties returning to visit Pound at the Asylum of St.
Elisabeths." He asked Pound whether the surroundings obstructed him. "Not at
all" Pound stated, "they are the only acceptable Americans." When Laubies told
Pound that he was born inSaigon: "Ah, that's why! Only Europeans with a master
key to the Suez Canal are worth something...." Charles Olson was a frequent
visitor (Pound wrote in a note to his attorney that "Olson saved my life" by
providing sane conversation). Olson eventually became disgusted with Pound's antisemitic statements
and stopped his visits.[21] Sinologist and budding Pound scholar Achilles
Fang became an important correspondent on Chinese subjects, especially
Confucius, during these years;[22] he and Pound were to exchange 214 letters.
Rudd Fleming, a professor at the University of Maryland, visited Pound often.
They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles' Electra, which was published
by Princeton University Press in 1989.[24] Fleming stated, when asked about
Pound's antisemitism, that Pound considered it a mistake. A statement from
Pound's foreword to a collection of his prose writings (written on July 4,
1972) would seem to support Fleming's assertion: "In sentences referring to
groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: I was out of
focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE."[25] Pound also
declared in a 1967 interview with Allen Ginsberg, "The worst mistake I made
was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism." [26]
Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow
poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was
still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others. He
subsequently returned to Italy. When he arrived in Naples in July, 1958, he
hailed his adopted country with a fascist salute.[27] 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."[27] Pound went on first to Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen,
then later to Rapallo and Venice. He remained in Italy until his death in
1972.
Death
Grave of Pound on the cemetery island ofSan Michele, Venice.
On his release, Pound returned to Italy, continuing work on The Cantos. In
1972, two days after his 87th birthday, Pound died in Venice, where he is
buried.
Pound and music
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated
as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to themotz et
sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted,
"melody and poem existed in a state of the closestsymbiosis, obeying the same
laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style
to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation
work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined.
But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound
found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for
young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François
Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot
translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines,
Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice composer,
writing privately that he intended a revolt against the impressionistic music
of Claude Debussy. Anautodidact, Pound described his working method as
"improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present 'laws'..."
With only a few formal lessons in music composition, Pound produced a small
body of work, including a setting of Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno", for
violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a
setting of François Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti,
a setting of 11 poems by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300). Pound began
composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, a London pianist and
vocal coach. Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar
Robert Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically
responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design.
During his years in Paris (1921–1924), Pound formed close friendships with the
American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's touring partner,
the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound championed Antheil's music
and asked his help in devising a system of micro-rhythms that would more
accurately render the vitalistic speech rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le
Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were
considerably more elaborate than Stravinsky's benchmarks of the period, Le
Sacre du Printemps (1913) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere",
one of the opera's key arias, at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88, moves from
2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25–28), making it difficult for
performers to hear the current bar of music and anticipate the upcoming bar.
Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview concerts of Le Testament,
but insisted to Pound that the meter was impractical.
In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; no comfort zone for
singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale
to evoke the feel oftroubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout,
from the stream of unrelenting dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand
shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm
carries the emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls
for human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs, and
counter-rhythms lurch against each other—an offense to courtly etiquette. With
"melody against ground tone and forced against another melody", as Pound puts
it, the work spawns apolyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws
of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable"
rhythm conducted in the laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship
between words and music.
After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil
Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a musician's
music", he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's music since Thomas
Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory."
Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque pointillistic orchestration
and derives its vitality from complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on
extensions of melody. Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the
opera's numbers are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound
incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a musical
motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time his
relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual
acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects
of Stravinsky. Cavalcanti demands attention to its varying cadences, to a
recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves
creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established laws of
composition, history, physiology, reason, and love.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME", distinguishes his 20th
century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which
sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently
biased for complex, asymmetric, and fast tempi; it thrives on innovation and
surprise. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches; it can
accommodate older styles of music with their symmetry, repetition, and more
uniform tempi, as well as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical
micro-metrical divisions of rhythm created for Le Testament. Pound was a
friend of Igor Stravinsky.
Legacy
Because of his political views, his support of Mussolini, his opposition to
central banking, and his anti-Semitism, Pound acquired many enemies throughout
the second half of the twentieth century, although there were those who felt
that Pound's work and his politics should be kept apart, as whenGeorge
Orwellsupported Pound's
Bollingen Prize on principle while completely disagreeing with his political
views (and incidentally while regarding Pound as "an entirely spurious writer"16.)
Historians and scholars generally agree, however, that Pound played a vital
role in the modernist revolution in20th
century literaturein English.
The location of Pound—as opposed to other writers such asT.
S. Eliot—at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was
famously asserted by the criticHugh
Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movementThe
Pound Era. The criticMarjorie
Perloffhas also insisted upon
Pound's centrality to numerous traditions of 'experimental' poetry in the 20th
century. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employfree
versein extended compositions.
His Imagist poems influenced, among others, theObjectivists.The
Cantosand many of Pound's
shorter poems were a touchstone forAllen
Ginsbergand otherBeatpoets;
Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use ofparataxiswhich
had a major influence on his poetry. Almost every 'experimental' poet in
English since the early 20th century has been considered by some to be in his
debt.
As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped shape the careers of some of the
20th century's most influential writers including
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