Ezra Pound

• Author: Razvan Pirnac
• Filed under: Celebrities
• Date: Apr 26,2008

American poet and critic, often called “the poet’s poet” because his profound influence on 20th century writing in English. Pound believed that poetry is the highest of arts. A rebel par excellence, he challenged many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital. Pound’s major work was the Cantos, which was published in ten sections between 1925 and 1969, and then as a one-volume collected edition, THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND I-CXVII (1970). Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry–stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (Hailey, Idaho Territory, United States, October 30, 1885 – Venice, Italy, November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound was the driving force behind several Modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped shape the careers of some of the 20th century’s most influential writers. These writers include W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Immediately before the first world war Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists (Pound coined the word). Pound did much to publicize the movement and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of the wider public (he was particularly important in the artistic careers of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis).

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