There’s no denying that Ezra Pound (30th October 1885 – 1st November 1972) was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Born in Idaho territory in 1885, Pound was the only child of English expatriate parents, Pound went to a Quaker school and had his first poetry published at 11 years old.
Into adulthood, Pound was credited with being a leading figure in Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese poetry, stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language. He’s also credited with being a major figure in early modernist poetry.
Pound moved to England in the early 20th century and worked for several literary magazines, where he helped to discover contemporaries such as T. S Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. However, Pound lost faith in Great Britain with the carnage of World War I and this shaped his future and made him the controversial figure he is remembered for today. He felt the war was nothing but a money making scheme and disenfranchised he moved to Italy where he embraced Mussolini’s fascism, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications by British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley.
By World War II he was considered a deeply unsavoury figure, making hundreds of radio broadcasts criticising the US, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews. By 1945 he was arrested for treason and it was while in custody he wrote his best known (and unfinished) work, The Cantos. In 1949 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress, leading to enormous controversy, but it was enough to break much of the bad feeling surrounding the poet and after a campaign by his fellow writers, Pound was released from custody to live out his life in Italy.
Due to his political views, his work is as controversial today as it was during his lifetime. in 1933 Time magazine called him “a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children”. Hemingway wrote: “The best of Pound’s writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the Cantos, here is Canto 1, read by the poet.
Birmingham Poet, Benjamin Zephaniah dies, aged 65
QUIZ! On a Poet’s Birthday – Remember by Christina Rossetti
“If you’re unfamiliar with the Cantos, here is Canto 1, read by the poet.”
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