Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic who played a central role in early modernist poetry and later collaborated with Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His major works include *Ripostes* (1912), *Hugh Selwyn Mauberley* (1920), and *The Cantos* (written roughly between 1915 and 1962). Pound helped launch Imagism, a poetic movement focused on precise, economical language. While living in London and serving as foreign editor for several American literary magazines, he discovered and influenced writers such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He arranged 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 of Joyce’s *Ulysses* starting in 1918. In 1932, Hemingway wrote that for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, avoiding Pound’s influence would be like “passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold.”

Outraged by the destruction of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called “usury.” He moved to Italy in 1924 and during the 1930s and 1940s promoted social credit economics, wrote for publications owned by British fascist Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini’s fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II, he recorded hundreds of paid propaganda radio broadcasts for the fascist Italian government and its later German puppet state. In these broadcasts, he attacked the U.S. government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain, international finance, the arms industry, Jews, and others he accused of prolonging the war. He also praised eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy, and urged American soldiers to surrender. In 1945, Italian partisans captured Pound and turned him over to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, who held him on a treason indictment. He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Declared mentally unfit for trial, he was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.

While in U.S. military custody in Italy, Pound continued working on *The Cantos*. The resulting *Pisan Cantos* was published by New Directions in 1948 and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 from the American Library of Congress, sparking enormous controversy. After a campaign by fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called the United States “an insane asylum.” He remained in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have kept his life and literary legacy deeply controversial.

**Early life and education (1885–1908)**

**Family background**

Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston, who had married in 1884. Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the U.S. General Land Office. Ezra’s paternal grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican U.S. House member and the 10th lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, had secured Homer the job. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business. Both sides of the family had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father’s side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra’s paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis, married Thaddeus Coleman Pound. On his mother’s side, Pound descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who immigrated to Boston on the *Lion* in 1632; his son Joseph Wadsworth helped write the first Connecticut constitution. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound’s maternal grandparents. After military service, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra’s wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped care for Isabel, Pound’s mother.

**Early education**

Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old. Her husband followed and found work as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After moving to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1893 the family bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in nearby Wyncote. 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. Known as “Ra” (pronounced “Ray”), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894. His first publication appeared on 7 November 1896 in the *Jenkintown Times-Chronicle* (“by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years”), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election. In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and learned drilling and shooting. The following year he made his first overseas trip, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. He attended CMA until 1900, sometimes as a boarder, but apparently did not graduate.

**University**

In 1901, at 15, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy. His only distinction in first year was in geometry; his other grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major.