Information AboutEzra Pound |
|
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound ( October 30 1885 – November 1 1972 ) was an American Expatriate Poet , Musician , and Critic who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to mid- 20th Century Poetry . He was the driving force behind several Modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism . EARLY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARIES Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho , United States , to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. He studied for two years at the University Of Pennsylvania and later received his M.A. in Romance Philology from Hamilton College in 1905. During studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he was engaged for a time. H.D. also became involved with a woman named Frances Gregg around this time. Shortly afterwards, H.D. and Gregg, along with Gregg's mother, went to Europe. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana , for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908 he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice . THE LONDON REVOLUTION wartime number of the Vorticist magazine '' BLAST '']] Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the Pre-Raphaelite s and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme , he began to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England, eventually being employed as the Irish poet's secretary. He was also interested in Yeats's Occult beliefs. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex , England, studying Japanese , especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa , an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese characters Pound developed into what he called the Ideogrammic Method . In 1914 , Pound married Dorothy Shakespear , an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W.B. Yeats. In the years before the First World War , Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism , and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism , which was led by Wyndham Lewis . These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce , Wyndham Lewis , William Carlos Williams , H.D. , Jacob Epstein , Richard Aldington , Marianne Moore , Rabindranath Tagore , Robert Frost , Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska , can be seen as central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend 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 Pound described as “For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku ( 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. 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 entitled "The Invention of China" in his ''The Pound Era'' contends that ''Cathay'' should be read primarily as a book 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".''The Pound Era'' (New York: New Directions, 1971), p.199 These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West. The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published ''Homage to Sextus Propertius'' ( 1919 ) and '' Hugh 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 Leger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was also good friends with 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 Opera s (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. ITALY ), in the Sacred Books Of The East .]] On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo , Italy . He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily , and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925.Ira B. Nadel (editor), ''The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound,'' page xxii. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-64920-X 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 made his first trip back home to the U.S. in many years in 1939, on the eve of World War II , and considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. Aside from his political sympathy with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. 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 (or Maria) 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 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. He became a leading Axis Propagandist . He also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing, and he wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Pound believed that economics was the core issue at hand. Specifically, his talks were largely about Usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of Central Bank s, 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 was not the first prominent American to make this assertion; for example New York City Mayor John Hylan had publicly said the same thing back in 1922 when he said "these international bankers control the majority of the magazines and newspapers in this country." Pound believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and incorporated anti-Semitism into his denunciations of the war. It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable, though it is clear that his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of books and pamphlets) did have some influence in Italy. The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence 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. On July 10 , 1943 , the Allied forces landed in Sicily and rapidly began to overrun the southern part of Italy. On July 25 , 1943 King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini and dismissed him as the premier of the Kingdom of Italy. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was arrested and sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy (Abruzzo). About two months after he was stripped of power, Mussolini was rescued and relocated to the north by the Germans, where he declared himself the President of the new Saló Republic . Pound played a significant role in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945. On May 2 , 1945 , he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner ) "to their HQ in Chiavari , where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa , spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a Nervous Breakdown . He also 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. 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 the Kingdom Of 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 Saló Republic , evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found unfit to face trial by reason of Insanity by a special federal jury1 and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. , where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His Insanity Plea is still a matter of controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do not appear to be those of a clinically insane person. Treason is potentially a Capital Offense . As it turned out, there were a number of other American Axis collaborators who stood trial after the war without being sentenced to death. Pound's controversial insanity plea is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author and collaborator Knut Hamsun , who was dubbed insane by embarrassed authorities despite evidence in the form of subsequent published material to the contrary. Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum." Subsequently he returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1972. E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was coddled by 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 three books, received visits from literary celebrities and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife and several mistresses. 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 was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on '' The Cantos '' as well as translating the Confucian classics. |
|
|