Ezra Pound

Bio

(1885-1972) Poet, editor, critic, translator. Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. He graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in 1905, and received his master of arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906. He lived in Manhattan, New York and was an extremely important influence in the shaping of 20th century poetry. He was one of the most famous and controversial literary figures of this century. Pound was, by turns, praised as a subtle and complex modern poet, dismissed as a naive egotist and pedant, and/or condemned as a traitor and reactionary. In 1907 he left the United States to travel in Europe, eventually settling in England. The series of poetry books he published there, including “Personae,” “Exultations,” “Canzoni,” and “Ripostes,” attracted attention for their originality and erudition. Pound encouraged many young writers, notably T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. In the early 1920s he moved to Paris, where he became associated with Gertrude Stein and Earnest Hemingway. By 1925 he was settled in Italy; there his literary ideas began to take a political and economic turn, and, discouraged by the faults and failings of English and American democracy, he began to develop many of the theories that were to make him unpopular in Great Britain and the United States.