125 Facts About Ezra Pound

1.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II.

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2.

Ezra Pound's works include Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c.

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3.

Ezra Pound was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

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4.

Ezra Pound moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler.

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5.

Ezra Pound spent months in a U S military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage.

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6.

On his mother's side, Ezra Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632.

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7.

Ezra Pound's education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893.

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8.

Ezra Pound attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.

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9.

In 1901 Ezra Pound was admitted, aged 15, to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts.

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10.

Ezra Pound was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.

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11.

Ezra Pound studied the Provencal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and The Seafarer.

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12.

Ezra Pound spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library.

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13.

Ezra Pound took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.

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14.

From September 1907 Ezra Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College, a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which he called "the sixth circle of hell".

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15.

Ezra Pound was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room.

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16.

Ezra Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain.

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17.

Ezra Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.

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18.

Ezra Pound soon moved to Islington, but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.

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19.

Ezra Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Ezra Pound reviewed it himself in the Evening Standard: "The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it.

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20.

In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Ezra Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

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21.

Ford Madox Ford described Ezra Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":.

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22.

Ezra Pound would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.

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23.

At a literary salon in 1909, Ezra Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Ezra Pound's wife in 1914.

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24.

Ezra Pound had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming".

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25.

Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here.

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26.

Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Ezra Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them".

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27.

In or around September, Ezra Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.

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28.

Ezra Pound visited a friend, Walter Rummel, in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens.

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29.

In June 1910 Ezra Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic.

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30.

Ezra Pound wrote in Ford Madox Ford's obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its "stilted language".

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31.

Ezra Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921, attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane.

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32.

Ezra Pound introduced her to his friends, including Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913.

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33.

Ezra Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes, trying to move away from his earlier work.

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34.

Ezra Pound wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.

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35.

Samuel Putnam knew Ezra Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view.

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36.

Ezra Pound's attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris.

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37.

Appearance of Des Imagistes, An Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, "confirmed the importance" of Imagisme, according to Ira Nadel.

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38.

Ezra Pound's arrived in London in July 1914 to attend two dinners at the Dieudonne restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the publication of Blast and the second, on 17 July, the publication of Des Imagistes.

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39.

Upset at Lowell, Ezra Pound began to call Imagisme "Amygism"; he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves Imagistes.

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40.

On 22 September 1914 T S Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken, to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock".

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41.

Ezra Pound has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.

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42.

Ezra Pound's Cathay, published in April 1915, contains 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry that Ezra Pound translated into English based on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa.

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43.

Robert Graves wrote in 1955: "[Ezra Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer.

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44.

Ezra Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915.

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45.

Ezra Pound described it in September 1915 as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore".

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46.

In February 1916, when Ezra Pound was 30, the poet Carl Sandburg paid tribute to him in Poetry magazine.

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47.

Ezra Pound is a new roamer of the beautiful, a new fetcher of wild shapes, in each new handful of writings offered us.

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48.

In June, July and August 1917 Ezra Pound had the first three cantos published, as "Three Cantos", in Poetry.

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49.

Ezra Pound was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines.

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50.

Ezra Pound wrote weekly pieces for The Egoist and the Little Review; many of the latter complained about provincialism, which included the ringing of church bells.

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51.

Ezra Pound had asked the publisher for a raise to hire a typist, the 23-year-old Iseult Gonne, causing rumors that they were having an affair, but he was turned down.

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52.

Suspicion arose in June 1918 that Ezra Pound himself had written an article in The Egoist praising his own work, and it was clear from the response that he had acquired enemies.

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53.

Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter in April 1919 from a professor of Latin, W G Hale, who found "about three-score errors" in the text; he said Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", that "much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible", and that "If Mr Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide".

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54.

Ezra Pound strove to resuscitate the dead artOf poetry; to maintain "the sublime"In the old sense.

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55.

Ezra Pound had become "violently hostile" to England, according to Richard Aldington, feeling he was being "frozen out of everything" except the New Age, and concluding that the British were insensitive to "mental agility in any and every form".

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56.

Ezra Pound had "muffed his chances of becoming literary director of London—to which he undoubtedly aspired, " Aldington wrote in 1941, "by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners.

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57.

On 13 January 1921 Orage wrote in the New Age: "Mr Ezra Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country.

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58.

Ezra Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting.

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59.

Ezra Pound was introduced to the American writer Gertrude Stein, who was living in Paris.

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60.

Ezra Pound's wrote years later that she liked him but did not find him amusing; he was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not".

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61.

Ezra Pound introduced him to his contacts, including Lewis, Ford, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway tried to teach Ezra Pound to box.

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62.

Unlike Hemingway, Ezra Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend his time in salons or building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

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63.

Ezra Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the summer of 1922.

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64.

In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927, Ezra Pound said The Cantos was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial, and "[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue":.

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65.

Rudge and Ezra Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in Gais, South Tyrol, whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month.

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66.

Ezra Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women.

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67.

Ezra Pound had hired two singers for the performance; Rudge was on violin, Ezra Pound played percussion, and Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway were in the audience.

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68.

Ezra Pound was sent to live at first in Felpham, Sussex, with a former superintendent of Norland College, which trains nannies, and later became a boarder at Charterhouse.

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69.

In Hemingway's contribution, "Homage to Ezra", he wrote that Pound "devotes perhaps one fifth of his working time to writing poetry and in this twenty per cent of effort writes a large and distinguished share of the really great poetry that has been written by any American living or dead—or any Englishman living or dead or any Irishman who ever wrote English.

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70.

Ezra Pound defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail.

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71.

Ezra Pound sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills.

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72.

Ezra Pound's parents visited him in Rapallo that year, seeing him for the first time since 1914.

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73.

Ezra Pound's father had retired, so they moved to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.

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74.

Ezra Pound came to believe that World War I had been caused by finance capitalism, which he called "usury", and that the Jews had been to blame.

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75.

Ezra Pound wrote to Bill Bird that the press in Paris was controlled by the Comite des forges.

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76.

Ezra Pound came under the influence of Charles Maurras, who led the far-right Action Francaise.

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77.

In December 1932 Ezra Pound requested a meeting with Mussolini after being hired to work on a film script about Italian fascism.

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78.

Ezra Pound had asked to see him before—Olga Rudge had played privately for Mussolini on 19 February 1927—but this time he was given an audience.

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79.

Ezra Pound said: "No, it's my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English", to which Mussolini replied "How entertaining".

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80.

Ezra Pound tried to discuss an 18-point draft of his economic theories.

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81.

Ezra Pound's antisemitism deepened with the introduction in Italy of the racial laws in 1938, preceded by the publication in July that year of the Manifesto of Race.

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82.

When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Ezra Pound to organize the funeral, where he saw their 12-year-old son, Omar, for the first time in eight years.

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83.

Ezra Pound visited Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who produced a famous portrait of Pound reclining.

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84.

Ezra Pound lobbied senators and congressmen, had lunch with the Polish ambassador, warning him not to trust the English or Winston Churchill, and asked to see the President but was told it could not be done.

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85.

Kaltenborn, whom Ezra Pound referred to at the time as Kaltenstein, gave an anti-fascist speech after lunch, which Ezra Pound interrupted loudly to the point where, according to one account, the college president had to intervene.

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86.

Between May and September 1939 Ezra Pound wrote 12 articles for the Japan Times, which included the claim that "Democracy is currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews'".

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87.

Ezra Pound discussed the "essential fairness of Hitler's war aims" and wrote that Churchill was a senile front for the Rothschilds.

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88.

When war broke out in September 1939, Ezra Pound began a letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned months earlier.

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89.

Between 23 January 1941 and 28 March 1945, including during the Holocaust in Italy, Ezra Pound recorded or composed hundreds of broadcasts for Italian radio, mostly for EIAR and later for a radio station in the Salo Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern and central Italy.

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90.

Styling himself "Dr Ezra Pound", he attacked the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt's family, Churchill, and the Jews.

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91.

Ezra Pound praised Hitler, recommended eugenics to "conserve the best of the race", and referred to Jews as "filth".

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92.

In Rome when the German occupation began, Ezra Pound headed north to Gais, on foot and by train, to visit his daughter, a journey of about 450 miles.

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93.

Ezra Pound wrote to Dorothy from Salo asking if she could obtain a radio confiscated from the Jews to give to Rudge, so that Rudge could help with his work.

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94.

From 1 December 1943 Ezra Pound began writing scripts for the state's new radio station.

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95.

Ezra Pound wanted to write for the more reputable Corriere della Sera in Milan, but the editor regarded his Italian as "incomprehensible".

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96.

Ezra Pound picked up the Confucian text Four Books and a Chinese–English dictionary and was taken to their headquarters in Zoagli, then at his request to the U S Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by FBI agent Frank L Amprin.

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97.

Ezra Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to help negotiate a "just peace" with Japan.

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98.

Ezra Pound wanted to make a final broadcast called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he would recommend not only peace with Japan, but American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany.

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99.

Ezra Pound's requests were denied and the script was forwarded to J Edgar Hoover.

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100.

Ezra Pound lived in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, apart from daily access to the chaplain.

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101.

Ezra Pound began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos.

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102.

Holder, one of the escorting officers, wrote in an affidavit that Ezra Pound was "an intellectual 'crackpot'" who intended to conduct his own defense.

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103.

Ezra Pound had turned a small alcove on the ward into his living room, where he entertained friends and literary figures.

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104.

Ezra Pound had apparently prepared a statement—"No comment from the Bug House"—but decided instead to stay silent.

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105.

Kasper wrote to Ezra Pound after admiring him at university, and the two became friends.

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106.

Between late 1955 and early 1957, Ezra Pound wrote at least 80 unsigned or pseudonymous articles—"often ugly", Swift notes—for the New Times of Melbourne, a newspaper connected to the social-credit movement.

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107.

Ezra Pound contributed similar material to other publications, including Edge, which Stock founded in October 1956.

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108.

Ezra Pound's friends continued to try to get him out of St Elizabeths.

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109.

Ezra Pound's visited him twice, in 1952 and 1955, but could not convince him to be more assertive about his release.

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110.

Ezra Pound ended by saying "To be even more blunt, I have always loved Dorothy, and still do.

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111.

The Nation argued that Ezra Pound was a "sick and vicious old man", but that he had rights.

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112.

Ezra Pound picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary tract infection.

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113.

In 1961 Ezra Pound attended a meeting in Rome in honor of Oswald Mosley, who was visiting Italy.

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114.

Ezra Pound's notes said he had psychomotor retardation, insomnia, depression, and he believed he had been "contaminated by microbes".

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115.

Ezra Pound went on to Hamilton College and received a standing ovation.

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116.

Ezra Pound "looked very morose" and barely spoke: "There is nothing harder than conversing with Pound nowadays, " Reck wrote.

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117.

Ezra Pound offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck.

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118.

Ralph Fletcher Seymour published Patria Mia to show that Ezra Pound was an American patriot.

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119.

Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound adopted a New Critical approach, where all that mattered was the work itself.

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120.

The first PhD dissertation on Ezra Pound was completed in 1948, and by 1970 there were around ten a year.

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121.

In 1971 Terrell founded the National Poetry Foundation to focus on Ezra Pound, and organized conferences on Ezra Pound in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990.

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122.

Ronald Bush's The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos became the first critical study of The Cantos.

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123.

Ezra Pound was a strong lyricist with an "ear" for words; his Times obituary said he had a "faultless sense of cadence".

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124.

Nadel cited the importance of Ezra Pound's editing of The Waste Land, the publication of Ulysses, and his role in developing of Imagism.

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125.

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner and one of his hospital visitors—Ezra Pound called her "Liz Bish"—reflected the ambivalence in her poem "Visits to St Elizabeths".

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