Ezra Loomis Pound Essay, Research Paper

This American poet and critic, wrote this letter to twentyeth century poets from Rapallo, Italy, on May 12, 1939: “Arriving at the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, I acknowledge debts to Professors McDaniel and Child for Latin and English, and to Ames for doing his best when no professor of American history had got down to bedrock. Overholser had not made his admirable compendium of the real causes of the Revolution and of the great and dastardly betrayal of the American people and the American system, by the trick clause, and the Bank Act of February 25, 1863.” Ezra Pound was born at Hailey, Ohio, an only child. His placid father, Homer Loomis Pound, a civil servant who ran the government land office in Hailey, went to work, as an assistant assayer, at the United States Mint. When Ezra was four when the family moved to Philadelphia. His mother, who had hated Hailey, was the former Isabel Weston of Washington, DC. In 1921 he wrote, to Thomas Hardy: “I come from an American suburb–where I was not born–where both parents are really foreigners.” He would later say that his father was overly naive but easy to live with, and that his mother was a “prude” who rarely agreed with him on any matter.” At twelve, Pound entered Cheltenham, a military college two miles from home. A neighbour recollected that “he was all books” and that the other boys made fun of him. He had already written his first poem; significantly, it was about William Jennings Bryan, and his populist “Free Silver” campaign-Bryan, like the older Pound, had the fruitless ambition of defeating bankers. The boy showed promise at Cheltenham, and was able to enlist at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of only fifteen. Once there (1901) he did his best to attract attention to himself–something he needed until he reached old age–with his long flaming-red hair and a gold-topped cane, and fought the authorities at every point. He was over-emotional and became unpopular with his more conventional classmates. A “sort of screwball,” one called him. But he did form one friendship: with a medical student of Puerto-Rican descent named William Carlos Williams. Williams himself liked him; but wrote home to his mother that “not one person in a thousand likes him and a great many people detest him”; he was “full of conceits and affectation.” One day he was frightened when Pound, who was a keen fencer–he even based his early poetical style on fencing-almost put his eye out with one of Homer Pound’s walking sticks. Pound also met, and had an adolescent romance with, the fifteen-year-old poet Hilda Doolittle (”HD”); she wrote about it in End to Torment. His parents, or his mother, became worried about the company he was keeping, particularly about that of William Brook Smith, a Philadelphia athelete who introduced him to such writers as Oscar Wilde; Pound’s A Lume Spento (1908), his first collection of verse, is dedicated to Smith as “Dreamer of Dreams.” So he was sent to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, as a special student. There, too, he was eccentric and unpopular; but he did discover Dante and the troubadours. By now he had acquired a curiosity about foreign languages–it is clear that this was never a “proficiency,” and Arthur Waley later noted that he read Chinese, learnedly, upside down–which enabled him to make rough, invented, excited translations from them. He graduated from Hamilton (1905) and returned to the University of Pennsylvania to work on English Literature and Romance Poetry. He gained an M.A. in 1906, and then visited Spain on a fellowship (summer, 1906). He had been to Europe once before, on a trip with an aunt. Pound’s studies were, as they always were, disordered; but in his keen excitement he managed to pick up a genuinely vast amount of knowledge of culture–and was able to retain much of it. In 1907, while he was simultaneously courting both Hilda Doolittle and a girl called Mary Moore (whose father was president of a railroad company), he was appointed instructor in French and Spanish at Wabash College, a small Presbyterian school in Crawfordsville, western Indiana. At this establishment cigarettes were forbidden, and absentees from chapel were noted in the town newspaper. Pound, who later (before World War I) had a portrait-sculpture made depicting himself as a phallus, set out to challenge their ways; he poured rum into his tea and dressed himself up like Whistler, smoking flamboyantly. “I do not teach,” he announced, “I awake.” Then he started an affair with a woman who was a male impersonator (she was not a prostitute, as has been asserted), and, as he put it (with some of the type of spelling he would increasingly employ) to a college friend in a letter of October 1907: “Two stewdents found me sharing my meager repast with the lady-gent impersonator in my privut apartments/keep it dark and find me a soft immoral place to light in when the she-faculty-wives git hold of that jewcy morsel. Don’t wrote home to me folks.”

In January 1908 the same girl was discovered in his rooms, this time by spinster college ladies, on a snowy night; he was dismissed in disgrace, but with pay until the end of the semester. In the following month he left for London, via Italy, with a grievance against all universities that would last for the whole of his life–and with a somewhat falsified portrait of himself as a learned, courtly gentleman what I was talking about?” But the insanity defence eventually succeeded–although Pound’s publisher James Laughlin complained to T. S. Eliot–who shared many of Pound’s views, but was far more circumspect about it–that “I think you and I both realise that Ezra is sane and the world is insane.’” A revival in Pound’s work began in 1947, largely promoted by James Laughlin’s New Directions. Poets from all over the world pleaded for his release, and The Pisan Cantos received the prestigious Bollingen Award. This opened a bitter controversy which was eventually summed up by Allen Tate, who argued that even if Pound had been convicted of treason, he had in his revitalization of language performed an “indispensable duty to society.” And, at least as a critic and as the poet of Mauberley, Pound had. He had been a central figure in modernism, and had–although not single-handedly–revived poetry in England. He had invented a kind of creative translation which, whatever it may be as translation, certainly led to the writing of much poetry. Bar-Yaacov, Lois. “Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound: In Distrust of Whose Merits?.” American Literature 63.1 (Mar 1991): 1-25. Beach, Christopher. “‘Who Else Has Lived through Purgatory?’: Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell.” Papers on Language and Literature 27.1 (Wint 1991): 51-83. Berezin, Charles. “Poetry and Politics in Ezra Pound.” Partisan Review 48.2 (1981): 262-79. Brogunier, Joseph. “An Annotated Bibliography of Works about Ezra Pound: 1980-1984.” Paideuma 16.1-2 (Sprg-Fall 1987): 93-257. Casillo, Robert. “The Desert and the Swamp: Enlightenment, Orientalism, and the Jews in Ezra Pound.” Modern Language Quarterly 45.3 (Sep 1984): 263-86. Casillo, Robert. “Anti Semitism, Castration, and Usury in Ezra Pound.” Criticism 25.3 (Sumr 1983): 239-65. “Ezra Pound, 1885-1972.” Yale Review 75.3. Flanagan, Kathleen. “Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell: English Poetics in Renditions of Chinese Poetry.” Paideuma 15.2-3 (Fall-Wint 1986): 163-73. Hatlen, Burton. “Ezra Pound and Fascism.” Ezra Pound and History. Ed. Marianne Korn. Orono: Nat. U of Maine, 1985. 145-72. Ingram, Claudia. “Sharing Strategies with the Discourses of Authority: Ezra Pound and the Legal ‘Modernists.’” Paideuma 24.1 (Sprg 1995): 39-52. Kappel, Andrew J. “Psychiatrists, Paranoia, and the Mind of Ezra Pound.” Literature and Medicine 4 (1985): 70-85. Langeteig, Kendra. “Visions in the Crystal Ball: Ezra Pound, H. D., and the Form of the Mystical.’ Paideuma 25.1 (Sprg-Fall 1996): 55-81. Tiffany, Daniel. Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. “Special Ezra Pound Section.” Journal of Modern Literature 15.1 (Sumr 1988): 7-103. Torrey, E. Fuller. The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths. NY: McGraw Hill, 1984. Tsukui, Nobuko. Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays. Washington, DC: UP of America, 1983.