Pound, Ezra (Vol. 2) | Pound, Ezra 1885–1972
Pound, Ezra 1885–1972
A major American poet and poetic influence, Pound lived in England, France, and (primarily) Italy for many years, doing broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II (for which activity he was captured and placed in an American mental institution for thirteen years). His masterpiece and life's work is the Cantos. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 37-40.)
It has become a truism that what Pound taught his successors was the double awareness of verse as speech and verse as song. As against the nubbliness of Browningesque diction, the coarse texture of common talk, the relative harshness of the English tongue, he set what he had learned of verbal music from having steeped himself in Provençal lyricism. He is one of the few contemporaries writing in English whose verse shows what he calls "thematic invention." This is of course, not merely the result of his close study of the...
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