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Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) |
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American poet and critic, often called "the poet's poet" because his profound influence on 20th century writing in English. Ezra Pound believed that poetry is the highest of all arts. A rebel par excellence, he challenged many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital. Cantos, Pound's major work, 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). The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another. (in ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound, New Directions Paperbook, 1960, p. 17; originally published in 1934) Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but he was brought up in
Wyncote, Philadelphia. His father, Homer Loomis Pound, worked as an
assistant assayer at the US Mint.
At the age of twelve Pound entered Cheltenham, a military school, where
he was introduced to Greek and Latin. He then studied languages at the
University of Pennsylvania, and befriended there the young William
Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who gained later fame as a poet in New
York's avant-garde circles. From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. His teaching career was cut short in 1907 at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had entertained an actress in his room. In 1908 Pound travelled widely in Europe, working as a journalist. A Lume Spento (1908), his first book of poems, was privately printed by A. Antonini in Venice. Inspired by the work of
Yeats, he went to London because he thought "Yeats knew more about
poetry than anybody else": He founded with Richard Aldington
(1892-1962) and others the literary "Imagism," and edited its first
anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The movement was influenced by thoughts of Rémy de Gourmont whose The Natural Philosophy of Love (1904) Pound translated later, and T.E. Hulme (1883-1917), who stressed the importance of fresh language and true perception on nature. In his cautions, published in Poetry in 1913, Pound wrote: "Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace'. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol." In their manifesto the Imagists promised: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subject or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." Pound's short "one-image poem" 'In a Station of the Metro' is among the most celebrated Imagist works: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." Pound had seen a succession of beautiful faces one day on the Paris Metro, and in the evening he found suddenly the expression for his sudden emotion. Pound soon lost interest in Imagism - he did not abandon totally formulaic verse - and after disputing with the poet Amy Lowell, Pound called the movement "Amygism." With Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in 1915, he founded "Vorticism," which produced a magazine, Blast. He helped Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to publish their works in the magazines Egoist and Poetry. Wyndham Lewis said Pound was the Trotsky of literature. Pound wrote on Joyce on various magazines, collected money for him, and even gave him spare clothes. In addition, Pound played crucial role in the cutting of Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot dedicated the work to Pound, as il miglior fabbro (the better maker). In 1913-14 Pound served as W.B. Yeats's secretary. They shared
an interest in music, although the Irish poet complained in a letter to
Lady Gregory that Pound "can't sing as he has no voice. It is like
something on a very bad phonograph." (Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, edited with commentary by R. Murray Schafer, 1977, p. 29) Pound married the artist Dorothy
Shakespear in 1914, "surely the most charming woman in London," as Pound
described her to his mother. After a vacation in Egypt, Dorothy
conceived in 1926 a boy, Omar. Disenchanted with English life and culture, Pound created an
alter ego, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, through whose voice Arnold Bennett
says, "No one knows, at sight a masterpiece. / And give up verse, my
boy, / There's nothing in it." Moreover, he had lost his close friends,
the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and T.E. Hulme to the war. Homage to Sextus Propertius,
creative translations from the love
elegies by the Roman poet Sextus Propertius, was
finished in 1917, but Pound did not publish the work until 1919. Eliot
omitted it from the 1928 edition of Pound's selected poems, "because it
is not enough a "translation," and because it is, on the other
hand, too much a "translation," to be intelligible to any but the
accomplished student of Pound's poetry." (Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, 1928) In 1922
Pound started his relationship
with the violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he had a daughter, Mary, born five
months before Omar. The child was given the name Mary; Olga rejected Pound's suggestion, "Polyxena." Pound has been called the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time. Beginning in 1913 with the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, he pursued a lifelong study of ancient Chinese texts, and translated, among others, the writings of Confucius. Pound's translations based on Fenollosa's notes were collected in Cathay (1915). Dante and Homer became other sources for inspiration. Especially Dante's journey through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos. In 1920 Pound moved to Paris - Britain
had become him "an old bitch, gone in the teeth." From the summer of
1921 until the winter of 1924, the Pounds resided at an apartment at
70-bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs; Pound
made it a small museum and gallery. The rent was only $30 a month. Ford Madox Ford met Hemingway
there. When Pound moved in December 1924 to Rapallo, Italy, the
American sculptor Janet Scudder took over the apartment. Pound lived in Italy over 20 years, comfortable with his
role as an outsider. When at last Mussolini gave him an audience in
January 1933, he presented to the dictator a copy of the Hours Press A Draft of XXX Cantos.
Pound saw in him the leader who stands with the lovers of order, the
long-needed economic and social reformer, "capable of opposing ANY
FORCE WHATEVER to infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of
men's blood for money." (Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years 1921-1939 by A. David Moody, 2014, pp. 137-141) Banknotes were for Pound a symbol of phoniness. He agreed with those who believed that the economic
system was being exploited by Jewish financiers. The Fascists dismissed Pound's Utopia as a plan of any sense of reality.
Although in America he was perceived as un-American, Pound was
loyal to the Constitution of the United States and its
democratic ideal. Provocately, he saluted the Fascist
revolution as the heir of the American revolution. During World War II Pound made on Rome Radio a series of
hysterical and bitter radio broadcasts, that were openly fascist. He praised Mein Kampf for its "keen historical analysis," advised his hearers to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and suggested pogrom against Jews. One of his ideas was that the USA
should cede
Guam to the Japanese in exchange for 300 film reels of Noh drama.
J.Edgar Hoover thought that Pound's speeches were constructed as aid
and comfort to the enemy. As a defence to his action, Pound said that freedom
of speech is a hollow sham if that does not include the right of free
speech over radio. (Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson by Alex Houen, 2002, p. 159) In
1945 he was arrested by the U.S. forces. A special six foot by six
foot "gorilla cage," as Pound would call it, was constructed for the poet,
to prevent him from escaping or hurting himself. Surrounded by barbed
wire and exposed to the harsh sun and dust, Pound was deprived of
everything except his life and two volumes of the Chinese text of
Confucius. Poems, assembled in Cantos
of that period, poured out of him. The opening lines were written down
in pencil on two sheets of toilet paper. "The enormous tragedy of the
dream in the peasant's bent shoulders. / Manes! Manes was tanned and
stuffed, / Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
/ by the heels at Milano /". The words refer to the deaths of Benito
Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci; their bodies were hung up
by the heels at a gas station in Milan. "Manes" or Mani was the founder
the the Manichean religion. After a week in the cage,
Pound's mind gave away, but he was left is solitary confinement for
another two weeks before he was transferred to a tent. Labelled as paranoid by the examining psychiatrists in a trial, Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the criminally insane. The poet Diane di Prima, who corresponded with Pound, visited him at the hospital and spent time with him there. She befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and described a Beat orgy with them in her erotic autobiography Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969). It has been suggested that Pound was feigning insanity to escape the
death penalty, but the treason indictment did not drastically affect
his ability to write and translate poetry. During this period he
received the 1949 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos,
which
concerned his imprisonment at the camp near Pisa. The Italian cantos 72
and 73, which he had sent to Mussolini in Saló Republic before his captivity, were not
included. After Pound was
released from St. Elizabeth's hospital due to the actions and efforts
of his last living protégé, Eustace Mullins, he returned to Italy,
where he spent his remaining years. Pound had taken a vow of silence
and when people stopped to greet him and his wife, he would stand in
patiently, in silence, while Olga took care of all the social
obligations. "He was tall and dignified and always elegantly dressed: a
broad-brimmed felt hat, a wool coat, tweed jacket, a flowing tie,"
recalled his neighbour in Venice. "His face was craggy, and his eyes
were immensely sad." (The City of Falling Angels by John Brendt, 2005, p. 57) Pound died on November 1, 1972, in Venice. He was buried in the Protestant section of the island cemetery of San Michele. Olga Rudge died in 1996. According to Katherine Anne Porter, "Pound was one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who ever lived, and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American constitutional right of free speech." (The Letters of E.P., 1907-1941, review in New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 1950) Pound published over 70 books. The Cantos are considered among his best achievements. Its last volume was Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX- CXVII (1968). Arthur Miller denounced his work as "sheer obscenity". The Cantos recorded the poet's spiritual quest for transcendence, and intellectual search for worldly wisdom. However, Pound did not try to imitate classical epic, but had several heroes instead of one, and projected his own self into his characters. His models were Dante's La divina commedia (c. 1320) and Robert Browning's confessional poem Sordello (1840). Pound's Hell is typified with liberalism, capitalism, and cultural degeneration. Just as Beatrice guided Dante's pilgrim, so also classical goddesses appear in the Cantos. In addition, through mythical, historical, and contemporary figures, Pound mirrored ideas of the past and present. Canto LXXII and Canto LXXIII were not published in the early collections due to their controversial - fascist - thoughts. Pound's style was clear, economical and concrete. "Great literature
is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,"
he once said. As an essayist Pound wrote mostly about poetry. From the
mid-1920s
he examined the ways economic systems promote or debase culture. In a letter to the Republican Idaho senator William E. Borah, 27 November 1933, he asked: "Why
the hell don't the schools give a little rudimentary education in
economics, the history of economics, and in the use of language?" Borah
replied: ""As an Idahoan" I suggest that you come back to Idaho and to
the United States. It isn't fair to give us so much "hell" at so
great a distance." (The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah, edited by Sarah C. Holmes, foreword by Daniel Pearlman, University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. 1-4) Pound hoped to get Borah's support for his radical theories – he believed that fascism
could establish the sort of society in which the arts could flourish.
Borah, who died in 1940, became antifascist in the late 1930s. Pound considered American culture isolated from the traditions that make the arts possible, and dismissed Walt Whitman as "exceedingly nauseating pill." (American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917 by Robert M. Crunden, 1993, p. 204) Pound's most influential publications on aesthetics are ABC of Reading (1934), which summarized his aesthetic theory and is said to have established the modernist poetic technique, and The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (pub. 1936), compiled from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa. For further reading: The Poetry of Ezra Pound by H. Kenner (1951); Ideas into Action by C. Emery (1958); Ezra Pound by Charles Norman (1960,rev. 1969); This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound by Eustace Mullins (1961); The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound by W. Baumann (1967); The Life of Ezra Pound by N. Stock (1970); Discretions by Mary de Rachewiltz (1971); The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner (1972); Ezra Pound: The Last Rower by C. David Heyman (1976); The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound by Michael Alexander (1979); Ezra Pound by James F. Knapp (1979); Ezra Pound and the Cantos by Wendy Stallard Flory (1980); Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos by A. Woodward (1980); Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano by John Tytell (1987); Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism by Tim Rddman (1991); Ezra Pound as Literary Critic by K.K. Ruthven (1991); ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Traditon by Christopher Beach (1992); The Birth of Modernism by Leon Surette (1993); Ezra Pound as Critic by G. Singh (1994); The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. by Ira B. Nadel (1999); Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920 by A David Moody (2007): Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume II, The Epic Years, 1921-1939 by David Moody (2014); Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume III: The Tragic Years 1939-1972 by David Moody (2015: Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism: Professional Attention by Michael Coyle and Roxana Preda (2018); Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos by Massimo Bacigalupo (2020); Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now by Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre (2021); The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini's Italy Shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers by Lauren Arringto (2021); Cross-cultural Ezra Pound by John Gery, Walter Baumann, and David McKnight (2021); "Amo l'America, nonostante..." : le vite parallele di Ezra Pound e Gore Vidal by Luca Gallesi; prefazione di Francesco Ingravalle (2022); Let the Wind Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound by Carol Loeb Shloss (2022); Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism: Professional Attention by Michael Coyle and Roxana Preda (2018); Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos by Massimo Bacigalupo (2020) - Translations into Finnish: Poundilta on käännetty suomeksi esseekokoelma Lukemisen aakkoset , suom. Hannu Launonen & Lassi Saastamoinen (1967) ja valikoima Personae: Valikoima runoja vuosilta 1908-1919, suom. Tuomas Anhava (1976). Lisäksi Aale Tynni teoksessa Tuhat laulujen vuotta (1974) ja Ville Revon antologiassa Tähtien väri (1992) on Pound-suomennoksia. Imagism: a short-lived movement of American and English poets, whose verse was characterized by concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, freedom in the use of meter, and avoidance of mystical themes. Members of the movement included Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint, T.E. Hulme, John Gould Fletcher, Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, whom Pound did not consider an imagist, but called her attempts "Amygism". The Imaginist movement deloped in 1913; its members published poems in Poetry and The New Freewoman (later The Egoist). Selected works:
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