Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, the son of Homer and Isabel Pound. Ezra ("Ra" or "Ray") was brought up from the age of four in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, where his father was assistant assayer to the US Mint.

His family were old fashioned stock, who had settled in America before the wave of European immigrants. All his life Pound tried to reconstruct a mythical homogeneous America from which he believed he came. This may explain how his later virulent anti-Semitism took root.

He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages. After graduation, Pound taught at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana (1907). His career was cut short when he was discovered to have entertained an actress in his rooms. Sickened by the small-town mentality, from then on he attacked the American academic system.

Pound founded the Imagists, which encouraged experimentation with verse forms and Vorticism, which opposed representational art in favour of abstract forms. Only two editions of its manifesto Blast were ever produced (1914 & 1915).

In 1924, the Pounds went to Rapallo in Italy (and Olga Rudge followed). Here he became interested in economics and social theories. He hated American capitalism and this, together with his love of order, contributed to his anti-Semitism and admiration for Mussolini, whom he met in 1933.

His new beliefs alienated many old friends. He had retreated into a world of fantasy from which he never quite escaped. "the man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of Fascism out of his brain..." one old friend wrote to another. When he applied for permission to return to the USA in 1941, this was denied.

From 1941-43 he broadcast pro-fascist propaganda in English on Rome radio. The broadcasts were rambling, self-delusionary and often brutish in their content.

In 1945, he was arrested for treason by the partisans and handed over to the US military authorities, to whom he declared that Hitler was a martyr and compared him to Joan of Arc. He was incarcerated at Pisa, in a prison compound where he slept on the concrete floor of a 10 foot square by 7 foot high cage. Here he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1943).

He was returned to America where his attorney found him "..very wobbly in his mind...". He was declared insane and unfit for trial and committed to St Elizabeth Hospital, Washington DC.

He continued to write. The award of the 1949 Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos created an uproar in literary circles.

Robert Frost and others pressed for his release which was granted in 1958. He returned to Italy, where he lived until his death in Venice in 1972. He was aged 87.

His influence on the development of 20th Century poetry, as both poet and critic, is enormous.