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Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia. He was educated at Hamilton College and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied languages and became lifelong friends with the poet William Carlos Williams.
In 1908, Pound moved to London, where he met prominent artists and writers, including W. B. Yeats, for whom he worked as secretary. He also championed the careers of promising writers such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Pound moved to Paris in 1920, and to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. During World War II, he made a series of pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts that culminated in an indictment for treason. He was adjudged mentally unfit and sentenced to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Washington, D.C., where he remained until 1958. Upon his release, he returned to Italy.
In 1912, Pound, H. D., and Richard Aldington had launched Imagism, and later, influenced by visual artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Pound moved on to Vorticism, whose practitioners strove to depict dynamic energies rather than represent static images. In 1920, Pound's attempts to modernize his work, to "make it new," while preserving the best history had to offer, resulted in Hugh Selwyn Mauherley, a work that anticipated Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), which Pound edited masterfully. The crowning achievement of his career is his epic, The Cantos, which he began to write in earnest in 1924 but never finished to his satisfaction. It is one of the principal texts of modernism.
Pound’s verse is collected in Personae: The Collected Poems (1949) and The Cantos (1976).
Sources:
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition 2005.
The Norton Introduction to Literature, shorter fifth edition 1991
Read more about Ezra Pound in The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound