Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on October 30, 1885, in a wooden house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston. His father worked as a land office registrar, a job secured by Pound’s paternal grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a former U.S. congressman and lieutenant governor of Wisconsin. Both sides of the family traced their American roots to English immigrants in the 1600s.

Early education

Pound’s mother, unhappy in Idaho, moved with him to New York when he was eighteen months old; his father followed and took a job at the Philadelphia Mint. The family later settled in Pennsylvania, where Pound attended dame schools, then Wyncote Public School. At age eleven, he published his first piece, a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, in a local newspaper.

At twelve, he entered Cheltenham Military Academy, where he wore a Civil War-style uniform and learned drilling and shooting. The next year, he traveled through Europe with his mother and an aunt. He left the academy around 1900 without graduating.

Pound became a major figure in early modernist poetry, known for works like Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (published through 1962). He helped develop Imagism, a movement that emphasized precise, economical language.

While in London as foreign editor for American literary magazines, he discovered and shaped the work of 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. Hemingway later wrote that for poets born in the late 1800s or early 1900s, not being influenced by Pound would be like passing through a blizzard without feeling the cold.

Radio broadcasts

World War I angered Pound, and he blamed the conflict on finance capitalism, which he called “usury.” He moved to Italy in 1924. During the 1930s and 1940s, he promoted social credit economics, wrote for publications owned by British fascist Oswald Mosley, embraced Mussolini’s fascism, and expressed support for Hitler. During World War II, he recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the fascist Italian government and its later German puppet state, attacking the U.S. government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain, international finance, the arms industry, Jews, and others. He praised eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy and urged American soldiers to surrender.

In 1945, Italian partisans captured him and turned him over to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, who held him on a treason indictment. He spent months in a military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Declared mentally unfit for trial, he was confined for over twelve years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

While in U.S. custody in Italy, Pound continued work on The Cantos. The section called The Pisan Cantos was published by New Directions in 1948 and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress in 1949, sparking major controversy. After a campaign by fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he gave the fascist salute for the press and called the United States “an insane asylum.” He stayed in Italy until his death on November 1, 1972. His economic and political views have kept his life and literary legacy deeply controversial.