Pound, Ezra (Vol. 112) | Introduction
Ezra Pound 1885–1972
(Also wrote under the pseudonyms B. H. Dias, Abel Saunders, and William Atheling) American poet, critic, translator, prose writer, essayist, and editor.
The following entry presents an overview of Pound's career. For further information on his life and works, see CLC, Volumes. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 13, 18, 34, 48, and 50.
INTRODUCTION
An erudite and highly controversial poet and critic, Ezra Pound is considered one of the preeminent literary figures of the twentieth century. Renowned for his Cantos, an ambitious series of historiographic meditations that excavate the cultural legacy of modern civilization, Pound developed experimental verse forms distinguished for their technical virtuosity, linguistic invention, and broad assimilation of European and Asian literature. Widely praised for their prodigious learning and epic scope, The Cantos document Pound's heroic effort to reconstruct two thousand years of Western history in a montage of ancient myth, literary arcana, and historical fragment. An influential theorist, translator, and prominent intellectual mentor during the early decades of the century, Pound also formulated many of the enduring aesthetic principles of High Modernism, particularly as delineated in his Imagist and Vorticist movements and in numerous critical works. Though castigated for endorsing fascist regimes during the Second World War, Pound is regarded as a brilliant radical thinker who revitalized contemporary literature with his challenging poetry and innovative artistic ideals.
Biographical Information
Born Ezra Loomis Pound in Hailey, Idaho, a frontier mining town, Pound was the only child of Isabel Weston Pound, a descendent of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Homer Loomis Pound, a government bureaucrat. His grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, was a successful entrepreneur and outspoken Republican congressman who impressed the young Pound as a model of the selfless public figure and independent thinker. In 1889, Pound moved with his family to Philadelphia, where his father was employed as an assayer for the United States Mint. He made his first visits to Europe with his family in 1898 and 1902. At age fifteen Pound enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle ("H.D."). Pound transferred to Hamilton College in upstate New York, earning a degree in philosophy in 1905, then re-
Major Works
A prolific poet, literary critic, and author of diverse treatises, Pound's artistic development reflects his abiding effort to revive modern art and society in a new unity of past and present. Drawing heavily upon forgotten or neglected classics of European, American, and Asian letters, Pound's mature poetry represents a synthesis of archaic forms, sophisticated allusion, and avant-garde tropes informed by his artistic, political, and economic beliefs. His first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento, displays his early lyrical style, affinity for classical and medieval subjects, and the influence of Robert Browning, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and François Villon. The poem "The Tree" from this volume is regarded as one of Pound's best short compositions. Subsequent collections—A Quinzaine for this Yule (1908), Personae, Exultations (1909), Provença (1910), and Ripostes (1912)—reveal Pound's technical mastery and assimilation of Anglo-Saxon, Asian, Pre-Raphaelite, and French and Italian troubadour verse, evident in oft anthologized poems such as "Sestina: Altaforte" and "Ballad of the Goodly Free." As the leader of the Imagist movement, a descendent of French Symbolism, Pound fortified his commitment to the tenets of clarity, concrete language, and le mot juste, or "the right word." His interest in Chinese writing exerted a profound influence on his poetry and precipitated the invention of his ideogrammatic method, an extension of Imagist principles inspired by the condensed precision and immediacy of Chinese characters. This approach justified the incorporation of foreign phrases, Chinese pictographs, and even musical scores in his writing to express a specific mood or concept. Pound's translations in Cathay, a collection of verse by eighth century Chinese poet Rihaku, also known as Li Po, are noted for their elegiac tone and austere beauty. These early translations, along with The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), anticipate Pound's adoption of dramatic masks, or speaker personae, through which to interpret past events in terms of modern analogues and subjective states. In "Homage to Sextus Propertius," contained in Qui Pauper Amavi, Pound interpolates the work of Roman poet Sextus Propertius with modern references, Latinate puns, and scatological humor aimed at contemporary figures. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a long poem permeated by the polemical tone of Vorticism, decries the tragedy of the First World War and the ambivalence of postwar English society. Through his caricature of Mauberley, rendered in conventional verse forms, Pound eschews the purely aesthetic concerns of his earlier writing in favor of greater social consciousness, marking a decisive shift in his self-identity as a poet. Pound invested his lifelong creative aspirations in The Cantos, the collective title given to 117 cantos produced between 1915 and 1968. Cantos 1-3, known as the "Ur-Cantos," offer a prospectus for his project. Drawing parallels to Odysseus's descent into the underworld in Homer's Odyssey and Dante's journey through heaven and hell in The Divine Comedy, Pound introduces his own epic story of cultural loss and reclamation. Though Pound's conception of The Cantos changed over time, the central motif involves the disinterment of the past to facilitate understanding and order in the modern world. Presented in alternately rhetorical, dramatic, and narrative modes, The Cantos are in large part an eclectic, multilingual palimpsest of Greek myth, Confucian philosophy, European history, economic theory, and contemporary affair's. Despite his expatriation and harsh criticism of American culture and capitalism, Pound maintained a distinctly American sensibility, evident in his admiration for Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, who appear as champions of political will in The Cantos. The Pisan Cantos, among the best known, reflect Pound's fragile emotional state during his imprisonment after the Second World War. In this moving sequence, Pound expresses his despair in an introspective, elegiac tone characteristic of his later cantos. In addition to The Cantos, Pound also produced significant works of criticism, including: The Spirit of Romance, a collection of critical essays on medieval literature based on his lectures at Regent Street Polytechnic in 1909; How to Read (1931), in which he delineates the concepts "melopoeia," "phanopoeia," and "logopoeia"—referring, respectively, to the musical, visual, and intellectual quality of poetic language; Guide to Kulchur (1938), Pound's writings on art, literature, politics, and economics; and Patria Mia (1950), in which he discusses artist patronage.
Critical Reception
Though widely recognized as one of the most important poets of the century. Pound is the subject of contentious critical debate. Acclaimed for his originality and intellectual gifts, Pound's complex allusive verse, his association with numerous literary movements, and his idiosyncratic political ideals—particularly his fascist loyalty—complicate interpretation of his work. Many critics hail The Cantos as his magnum opus and a highspot of twentieth century literature, calling attention to the extraordinary range and depth of Pound's expansive, though ultimately unrealized, literary and philosophical vision. Measured against the masterpieces of Homer and Dante, which Pound aspired to equal, most critics view The Cantos as a formidable achievement undermined by its lack of unity and difficult linguistic experiments. Pound's detractors question the efficacy of his ideogram-matic method and its implementation in The Cantos, especially where the use of cryptic language and obscure scholarly references render passages inaccessible. The Pisan Cantos, which polarized the literary community as the winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, is now regarded as one of the best sequences of The Cantos. Most of Pound's early poetry, including that of the once celebrated Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, is overshadowed by the accomplishment of The Cantos. Recent critical attention is directed at Pound's preoccupation with the past, his ethical concerns, his relationship with American literary tradition in commonalities with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and textual analysis of The Cantos. A foremost poet, critic, translator, and literary impresario who cultivated many of the century's greatest writers, notably Eliot and Joyce, Pound is regarded as one of the dominant intellectual forces of modern literature.
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