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Pound Explained His New

Ezra Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic born in 1885 who had a major influence on modernist literature. He lived in Europe for much of his life, promoting Imagism and publishing works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and others. Pound is best known for his epic poem The Cantos, on which he worked for 50 years but left unfinished. He had an incredible eye for talent and worked tirelessly to support and publish emerging writers through his work with literary magazines.

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61 views

Pound Explained His New

Ezra Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic born in 1885 who had a major influence on modernist literature. He lived in Europe for much of his life, promoting Imagism and publishing works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and others. Pound is best known for his epic poem The Cantos, on which he worked for 50 years but left unfinished. He had an incredible eye for talent and worked tirelessly to support and publish emerging writers through his work with literary magazines.

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Ezra Pound was born on 30th October,1885 in Hailey, Idaho.

He was the
son of Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. He was raised in
Wyncote, Pennsylvania. He studied Greek and Latin languages at
Cheltenham. After that he got his education at Hamilton College then
enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the
Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1905 and the Master of Arts degree in
1906.

Pound then worked as a lecturer in romance languages at Wabash College


in Indiana But due to an incident he was fired. He was accused of having
shared his bed with an actress though Pound claimed that he slept on the
floor.  He traveled throughout Europe in 1908, visiting Italy, Spain, and
England. He stayed most of his life in Europe. While he was on this tour
he became acquainted and interested in Chinese and Japanese poetry. This
interest had been vital throughout his creative life and it helped him
marshal his disparate interests into a disciplined aesthetic. In 1920 he
moved to Paris. He moved to Italy again in 1924 where he spent the next
twenty years.

Ezra Pound was a critic, an impresario and a propagandist. He has a major


hand in the shaping of modernism, with connections to era's most
influential writers of prose and poetry. He was an American expatriate.
Throughout his life in Europe, Pound became a huge supporter of
Imagism, a classical movement in poetry. Pound explained his new
literary direction in his literary essay "A Retrospect.". Imagism combined
the creation of an "image". He defined it as "an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time" or an "interpretative metaphor"—with
rigorous requirements for writing. About these requirements, Pound was
concise but insistent: "1) Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective
or objective 2) To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the
presentation 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." His utter emphasis on
"direct treatment" suggests the influence of painting as a model. His
famous imagist poem is A Station of the Metro(1911).

Pound joined hands with Wyndham Lewis and a group of other artists
radicals, based on the Rebel Art Centre. He coined the term Vorticism to
describe Lewi's art. He transformed his earlier idea regarding Imagism. He
now says: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is
what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through
which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” Pound and Lewis
together worked on the first issue of the journal BLAST. This magazine
was published just before the first world war, about less than a month.

His first volume of poetry was A Lume Spento and it was published in
Venice in 1908. His second volume was The Personae of Ezra Pound
and was published in London in 1909. The critics immediately
showered it with praises. During his stay in London, Paris and Italy,
he penned down some of the most beautiful and challenging poems of
the era such as Homage to Sextus Propertius in 1919 and Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley in 1920. In his literary career, Pound wrote more than
seventy books, contributed to some seventy others. He even published
more than fifteen hundred articles. His literary reputation is mostly
contained within Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, The Cantos, The
Spirit of Romance and The Literary Essays. In 1945 he was arrested by
the American forces for attacking the United States and its monetary
policies through broadcast over Italian radio in 1941.In 1949, he was
awarded the first Bollingen Poetry prize for the Piscan Cantos, written
during his internment after the war, partly in defence of his wartime
activities by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of
Congress, a group of distinguished poets.

His most impressive achievement lies in The Cantos. He worked in this


epic poem for the last fifty years of his life but was still incomplete. It
is partly modelled on the prior creations of Dante and Browning. Here,
he also explored the spiritual quest of modern poets. . Pound combines
borrowings from Homer, the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, the history
of the Italian Renaissance, President John Adams, Robert Browning,
and Chinese poetry (as interpreted by the scholar Ernest Fenollosa)
with offbeat economic and social theories to relate what he calls “the
tale of the tribe,” that is, the intellectual life of the human race,
exemplified in certain key historical or literary moments. His original
first Three Cantos had been published in Poetry (1917) and his Fourth
Cantoin 1919. Cantos V, VI, and VII appeared in the Dial (1921)
and "The Eighth Canto"appeared in 1922, but except for limited
editions, no new poems appeared in book form for the next decade. A
Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925) in an edition of only ninety copies came
out in Paris, and A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930; but commercial
editions of the first thirty Cantos were not published in London and
New York until 1933.

In one of his articles, in "How I Began" collected in Literary Essays, he


claimed that as a youth he had resolved to "know more about poetry than
any man living." In The Tale of the Tribe Michael Bernstein observed that
Pound "sought, long before the notion became fashionable, to break with
the long tradition of Occidental ethnocentrism."

His first major critical work, The Spirit of Romance, was, Pound said, an


attempt to examine "certain forces, elements or qualities which were
potent in the medieval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe,
still potent in our own."

The critic David Perkins, writing in A History of Modern


Poetry, summarized Pound's enormous influence: "The least that can be
claimed of his poetry is that for over fifty years he was one of the three or
four best poets writing in English"; and, Perkins continues, his
"achievement in and for poetry was threefold: as a poet, and as a critic, and
as a befriender of genius through personal contact." In a 1915 letter to
Harriet Monroe, Pound himself described his activities as an effort "to
keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their
rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization."
in 1950, Hugh Kenner could claim in his groundbreaking study The Poetry
of Ezra Pound, "There is no great contemporary writer who is less read
than Ezra Pound."

One of his major poems in the war years is "Homage to Sextus Propertius"
(1917). Here, he translates and adapts passages from the writings of a
difficult poet of the early Roman Empire into a modern American voice.

His first major critical work, The Spirit of Romance, was, Pound said, an


attempt to examine "certain forces, elements or qualities which were
potent in the medieval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe,
still potent in our own."

Pound also had another side which adds to his achievement. This was his
passion for the tireless promotion of other writers and artists. He had an
incredible eye for the talanted writers.

He persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of


J. Alfred Prufrock," calling it in a 1914 letter to Monroe "the best poem I
have yet had or seen from an American."
He supported the Irish novelist James Joyce by arranging for the
publication of several of the stories in Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in literary magazines before they were
published in book form. Read declared that Pound "got Joyce printed" and
"at critical moments Pound was able to drum up financial support from
such varied sources as the Royal Literary Fund, the Society of Authors, the
British Parliament, and the New York lawyer John Quinn in order to help
Joyce keep writing."

He promoted and cultivated other writers in American magazines like


Poetry (of which he was the London correspondent) and The Egoist(of
which he was the poetry editor).

He was a friend of William Butler Yeats, who was twenty years senior to
him. He has a special hand in encouraging Yeats to turn away from
romantic and symbolist poetic diction and towards poetic precision and
colloquial language. This happened in between 1913 and 1916 when they
shared a cottage in Sussex. During that time Pound worked as Yeats's
secretary and they studied occult lore, Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh
Drama.

Yeats also gave a helping hand to the Indian nationalistic and mystic
Rabindranath Tagore to translate his poems from Bengali to English.
Pound also published Tagore's work in the magazine Poetry.
In 1917 he became the London editor of The Little Review and there he
secured a regular place of publication for Joyce, Eliot and Lewis.

Pound also published T.S. Eliot's poetry. He even edited the manuscripts
of The Wasteland (1922). This famous poem was dedicated to Pound.
Here he calls Pound "the better artisan" or "poet", the best craftsman. Eliot
and Pound became good friends over the course of time. He also
"encouraged Eliot in his choice of career, country to live in, and wife to
marry" (Sharpe 46). In 1915, Eliot got married to Vivien with the
encouragement of Pound.

His excellence over the use of free verse line , his major literary effort, The
Cantos and his skillfull practice of the techniques of collage and allusion
have had a great and profound influence upon the twentieth century
literature. He placed a value on novelty and formal experimentation
through his expertise.

In his Life of Ezra Pound, Noel Stock recalled that in 1925, the first issue
of This Quarter was dedicated to "Ezra Pound who by his creative work,
his editorship of several magazines, his helpful friendship for young and
unknown ... comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this
generation." Even though Yeats's and Eliot's poetry are favored more and
read more often, Pound was still the most influential poet in establishing
the canon of modern poetry and was able to articulate its aims.
In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot declared that Pound "is more responsible for the twentieth-century
revolution in poetry than is any other individual." Four decades
later, Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected in Remembering
Poets that "Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any
other man, has made modern poetry possible in English."

Pound died in November, 1972. He was buried on the cemetery island


Isole di San Michele in Italy. Even after his death scholarly examination
of his works continued at full strength. Some letter collections that trace
his career and his evolution achievements were released. A Walking Tour
in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the Troubadors  contains notes
regarding his walking trip through Provence. It is a beautiful landscape
and cultural arena that influenced Pound's later Cantos.

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