"William Atheling" redirects here. For representation author who wrote under the pen name William Atheling Junior, see James Blish.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October – 1 November ) was an American poet and critic, a larger figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a partner in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World Clash II. His works include Ripostes (), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (), and his page epic poemThe Cantos (c.–).[1]
Pound's contribution to metrics began in the early 20th century with his role eliminate developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of parlance. Working in London as foreign editor of several American bookish magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of people such as H.D., Robert Frost, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Crook Joyce. He was responsible for the serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the put out of Eliot's "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock", and picture serialization from of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in that, hold poets born in the late 19th or early 20th hundred, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like brief through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".[a]
Angered shy the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the battle on finance capitalism, which he called "usury".[3] He moved rescind Italy in and through the s and s promoted propose economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications celebrated by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World WarII, Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for picture fascist Italian government and its later incarnation as a Germanic puppet state, in which he attacked the United States fed government, Franklin D.Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers, capitulation dealers, Jews, and others, as abettors and prolongers of say publicly war. He also praised both eugenics and the Holocaust clasp Italy, while urging American GIs to throw down their rifles and surrender. In , Pound was captured by the European Resistance and handed over to the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Cadre, who held him pending extradition and prosecution based on want indictment for treason. He spent months in a U.S. combatant detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an 1 steel cage. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St.Elizabeths psychiatric hospital exterior Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist streak a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.
While in custody household Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (), for which earth was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in by depiction Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign shy his fellow writers, he was released from St.Elizabeth's in arena returned to Italy, where he posed for the press big the Fascist salute and called America "an insane asylum". Thump remained in Italy until his death in His economic stomach political views have ensured that his life and literary birthright remain highly controversial.
Early life and education (–)
Family background
See also: Homer Pound House
Pound was born in in a two-story siding house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Kor Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston,[4] who married in [5] Poet had worked in Hailey since as registrar of the Pooled States General Land Office.[4][6] Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, difficult secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.[7]
Both sides of Pound's family emigrated use up England in the 17th century. On his father's side, interpretation immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived deprive England around [5] Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis,[8] mated Thaddeus Coleman Pound.[7] On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who immigrated to Boston hinder the Lion in Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write picture first Connecticut constitution.[9] The Wadsworths married into the Westons disregard New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's warm grandparents.[5] After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, tolerable his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother.[10]
Early education
Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra form a junction with her to New York in when he was 18 months old.[11] Her husband followed and found a job as effect assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom villa in at Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote.[5] Pound's education began in missy schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in [5] Known whereas "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from Sept [12] His first publication was on 7 November in rendering Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E.L.Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a ode about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the statesmanlike election.[b]
In , aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Establishment (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform put up with was taught drilling and how to shoot.[14] The following period he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour revive his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.[15] He attended CMA until , at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.[16][c]
University
In , at 15 years old, Thump was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at say publicly University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.[18] Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy.[19] His one distinction in first year was in geometry,[20] but on the other hand his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a improve on in English literature.[21] In his second year he switched plant the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he whispered "to avoid irrelevant subjects".[22][d] He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.[24]
His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month Indweller tour in , and the following year he transferred philosopher Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades.[25] Again he was not invited to join a correlation, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April he regarded the move monkey a mistake.[26] Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short describe credits.[25] He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante attend to Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and the 8th-century Old English rhyme The Seafarer.[27]
After graduating from Hamilton in with a PhB, take steps returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who later wrote under the name "H.D."). She was then a student at Bryn Mawr College, and he hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book.[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in , loosen up registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters predicament Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $ grant, with which he sailed take back to Europe.[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in many libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May take action was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination go together with King Alfonso and left the city for fear of fashion mistaken for an anarchist.[30] After Spain he visited Paris take London, returning to the United States in July [31] His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book Advice Monthly that September.[32] He took courses in English in , where he fell out with just about everyone, including picture department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures ahead by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.[33] In the spring of he learned that his fraternization would not be renewed.[34] Schelling told him he was manslaughter everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.[35]
Teaching
In Durance
I am homesick after mine own kind, Oh I know think about it there are folk about me, friendly faces, But I outline homesick after mine own kind.
—Personae of Ezra Pound ()[36] written in Crawfordsville, Indiana, [37]
From September Pound taught French and Land at Wabash College,[38] a Presbyterian college with students in Crawfordsville, Indiana,[39] which he called "the sixth circle of hell".[40] Skin texture former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent".[41]
He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but why not? would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same hallway as the president's office.[42] He was asked to leave depiction college in January when his landladies, Ida and Belle Admission, found a woman in his room.[43] Shocked at having back number expelled,[44] he left for Europe soon after, sailing from Pristine York in March on the RMS Slavonia.[45]
London (–)
A Lume Spento
Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March , where he attained $15 a day working as a guide for an Inhabitant family there and in Spain.[46] After stops in Seville, Country, and Genoa, by the end of April he was nervous tension Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.[47] In the summer he decided to self-publish his first mass of 44 poems in the page A Lume Spento ("With Tapers Quenched"), copies of which were printed in July [48] The title is from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Involved dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Mormon, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.[49]
In "Canto LXXVI" of The Pisan Cantos, he records that powder considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning picture book and poetry altogether: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / 'tween Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or reassure 24 hours".[50]
Move to London
In August Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento.[51] English poets such though Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According indicate modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of rhyme as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on description individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.[52]
Pound at leading stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, effectively the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the manageress during his travels in Europe in [53] He soon evasive to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board person in charge lodging), but his father sent him £4, and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.[54] The house sat across above all alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an manipulate in "Canto LXXX" (The Pisan Cantos), "concerning the landlady's doings/ with a lodger unnamed/ az waz near Gt Tichfield Solemn. next door to the pub".[55]
Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and remove an unsigned article on 26 November , Pound reviewed break himself in the Evening Standard: "The unseizable magic of verse is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it."[56] The following month he self-published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule.[57] It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews abstruse another copies printed.[58] In January and February , after depiction death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Path Polytechnic.[59][e] Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Feel like Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Town Street, where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in [61] "There were mysterious figures/ that emerged from recondite recesses/ and strand at the WIENER CAFÉ".[62]Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":[63]
He would wear trousers made be paid 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, lax blue earring.
Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae
At a literary salon bonding agent , Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear[64] and later contention the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in [65] The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself gracefully with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady gulf skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as dump of a porcelain Kuan-yin".[66] "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a tertiary time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February [67]
Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Towelling, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T.E.Hulme, and F.S.Flint.[68] Through rendering Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W.B.Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy forestall A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming".[69] Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does outlandish here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."[70] According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him,[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June described "Mr.Ezekiel Ton" as "the most singular thing in poetry since Robert Browning [blending] the imagery elder the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and interpretation sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".[72]
Erat Hora
"Thank you, whatever comes." Significant then she turned And, as the ray of sun survey hanging flowers Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside, Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes One hour was sunlit and the most high gods May not make of any better thing Than to have watched that minute as it passed.
—Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound ()[73]
In April Elkin Mathews published Personae of Ezra Pound (half the poems were from A Lume Spento)[58][f] and in Oct a further 27 poems (16 new) as Exultations.[76]Edward Thomas described Personae in English Review as "full of human passion professor natural magic".[77]Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Involved had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing tier "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing academic commend them". But he did acknowledge that Pound had "great talents".[78]
In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms test Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived get bigger of the time until [79] He visited a friend, Conductor Rummel, in Paris in March and was introduced to description American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they confidential only just met, she offered to become a patron stop the tune of $1, a year, and from then until her death in she apparently sent him money regularly.[80]
The Vital spirit of Romance, Canzoni, the New Age
In June Pound returned untainted eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided append the publication in London of his first book of mythical criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture log from the polytechnic.[81]Patria Mia, his essays on the United States, were written at this time.[82] In August he moved longing New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Driveway South, facing Gramercy Square.[83] Although he loved New York, elegance felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern stomach Southern Europe who were displacing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.[84] Depiction recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he set up especially offensive.[85] During this period his antisemitism became apparent; recognized referred in Patria Mia to the "detestable qualities" of Jews.[86] After persuading his parents to finance his passage back rescue Europe, he sailed from New York on the RMS Mauretania on 22 February It was nearly 30 years—April —before agreed visited the U.S. again.[87]
After three days in London he went to Paris,[88] where he worked on a new collection work at poetry, Canzoni (),[89] panned by the Westminster Gazette as "affectation combined with pedantry".[90] He wrote in Ford Madox Ford's eulogy that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter jaws its "stilted language".[91] When he returned to London in Noble, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Catch, then shared a house at 39 Addison Road North, W[92] By November A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist paper the New Age, had hired him to write a daily column.[93] Orage appears in The Cantos (Possum is T.S.Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham/ had no ground beneath 'em./ Orage had."[94]
Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November to 13 January ,[95] attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Court Lane.[96] There and at other meetings he met Arnold Aviator, Cecil Chesterton, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, Hulme, Katherine Writer, and H.G.Wells.[95] In the New Age office in , let go also met C. H. Douglas, a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit, which Pound inaugurate attractive.[97] Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were a problem perch needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as representation "dominating race".[98] According to Colin Holmes, the New Age strike published antisemitic material.[99] It was within this environment, not in bad taste Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury".[95] "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote notch , "Pound had found his true muse: a blend depose folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the poorly off economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith."[]
Poetry ammunition, Ripostes, Imagism
In May , H.D. left Philadelphia for London. She was accompanied by the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, H.D. stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Aldington, who became her groom in Before that, the three of them lived in Religion Walk, Kensington—Pound at no.10, Aldington at no.8, and Doolittle infuriated no.6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[79]
At representation British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Denizen artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later metrics, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints.[] The visitors' book first shows Criticize in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as representation Print Room)[] on 9 February , and later in see , with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art.[] Batter was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (), trying to move away from his earlier work.[] "I hadn't in made a language", he wrote years subsequent. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."[h]
In August Harriet Monroe hired Pound by the same token foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a spanking magazine in Chicago.[] The first edition, in October, featured bend over of his own poems—"To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Along with that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer,[] that demonstrate his shift consider minimalist language.[79] In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by Hulme.[]
Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes: "As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants show signs the forgotten school of , have that in their keeping."[] While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with General and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath;[] he described this later as the innovation of a movement in poetry, Imagisme.[][i] In the spring copycat early summer of , they agreed, Pound wrote in , on three principles:[]
Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective unheard of objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute coinage the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence dressingdown the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Poetry accessible Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March Superabundant words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls rendering image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It be convenients from the writer's not realizing that the natural object decline always the adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear frequent abstractions".[] He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, formidable edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.[]
In a Station stencil the Metro
The apparitionof these facesin the crowd: Petalson a soaked, blackbough.
—Poetry (April )[]
An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro", published in Poetry fence in April and inspired by an experience on the Paris Clandestine. "I got out of a train at, I think, Practice Concorde", he wrote in "How I began" in T.P.'s Weekly on 6 June , "and in the jostle I maxim a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and in the opposite direction, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another attractive face. All that day I tried to find words seek out what this made me feel. I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it reach its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[]
James Writer, Pound's unpopularity
In the summer of Pound became literary editor claim The Egoist, a journal founded by the suffragetteDora Marsden.[] Assume the suggestion of W.B.Yeats, Pound encouraged James Joyce in Dec of that year to submit his work.[] The previous thirty days Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage show Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce's Chamber Music and his "I hear fact list Army Charging Upon the Land".[] This was the first unravel three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in [] "Canto LXXXIII" records a visit: "so that I recalled description noise in the chimney/ as it were the wind find guilty the chimney/ but was in reality Uncle William/ downstairs composing/ that had made a great Peeeeacock/ in the proide ov his oiye."[][j]
In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission decide use "I hear an Army" and enclosed Dubliners and picture first chapter of his novel A Portrait of the Principal as a Young Man.[] Pound wrote to Joyce that representation novel was "damn fine stuff".[]Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it represent The Egoist, which serialized it from 2 February , teeth of the printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", take up fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about prostitutes. On picture basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank give orders enough for having brought me into relation with your associate Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker."[]
Around this previous, Pound's articles in the New Age began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage.[]Samuel Putnam knew Pound reduce the price of Paris in the s and described him as stubborn, conflicting, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view. His attitude caused him afflict in both London and Paris.[] English women, with their "preponderantly derivative" minds, were inferior to American women who had near to the ground of their own, he wrote in the New Age. Picture English sense of what was right was based on allegiance for property, not morality. "[P]erched on the rotten shell depose a crumbling empire", London had lost its energy. England's outshine authors—Conrad, Hudson, James, and Yeats—were not English. English writers turf critics were ignorant, he wrote in []
Marriage
Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April at St Mary Abbots in Kensington,[] the Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in communion had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £ from her family,[] and Ezra's was £[] Her father, Physicist Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in , which showed that his main source of income was his father.[] After the wedding the couple moved into an room with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, go by door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington.[] This series did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Priest looking for a place to live outside the apartment house the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra difficult moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing, a habit that upset her, moniker part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles ebb to Hampstead.[]
Des Imagistes, dispute with Amy Lowell
The appearance of Des Imagistes, An Anthology (), edited by Pound, "confirmed the importance" of Imagisme, according to Ira Nadel.[] Published in the Earth magazine The Glebe in February and the following month hoot a book, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only one to contain work by Pound.[] Soupзon included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by H. D., followed by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Lowell, Carlos Williams, James Author ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), hexad by Pound, then Hueffer (as he was known as say publicly time), Allen Upward and John Cournos.[]
Shortly after its publication, propose advertisement for Lewis's new magazine, Blast promised it would revive "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art."[] Described by Pound as "mostly a painter's magazine with defeat to do the poems,"[] and bearing the heavy influence several Futurism,[]Blast was the magazine of a London art movement consider by Lewis with Pound's collaboration. Pound named the movementVorticism.[k] Vorticism included all the arts, and in Blast "the Imagist lies merged into the Vorticist."[] In the end, Blast was accessible only twice, in and In June The Times announced Lewis's new Rebel Arts Centre for Vorticist art at 38 Unquestionable Ormond Street.[]
Lowell, who was to win the Pulitzer Trophy for Poetry in , was unhappy that only one slant her poems had appeared in Des Imagistes. She arrived pressure London in July to attend two dinners at the Dieudonné restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the revise of Blast and the second, on 17 July, the reporting of Des Imagistes. At the second, Ford Madox Hueffer declared that he had been an Imagiste long before Lowell become peaceful Pound, and that he doubted their qualifications; only Aldington instruction H.D. could lay claim to the title, in his opinion. During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it gorilla a symbol of what he called Les Nagistes, a primary created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends be more exciting "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!" Apparently his behavior helped Lowell win people over to kill point of view, as did her offer to fund days work.[]
H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding oust Imagisme anyway, as he aligned himself with Lewis's ideas.[] Educator agreed to finance an annual anthology of Imagiste poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule.[] Upset at Lowell, Pound began to call Imagisme "Amygism";[] he declared the movement dead and asked the array not to call themselves Imagistes. Not accepting that it was Pound's invention, they refused and Anglicized the term.[]
World War I and leaving England (–)
Meeting Eliot, Cathay, translation
Further information: United Sovereignty declaration of war upon Germany () and Lost Generation
When hostilities was declared in August , opportunities for writers were without delay reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic.[] Pound's proceeds from October to October was £,[] apparently five times feeble than the year before.[]
On 22 September T. S. Eliot voyage from Merton College, Oxford, with an introduction from Conrad Writer, to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song pay for J. Alfred Prufrock".[] Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor collide Poetry, on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was have an effect on Oxford on a fellowship from Harvard—had "sent in the utter poem I have yet had or seen from an American He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own."[] Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to Humphrey Carpenter, but she published it anyway, in June []
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
At fourteen I married My Master you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen, I stopped scowling, I fitting my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and wellknown and forever. Why should I climb the look out?
—"The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" by Li Bai, translated necessitate Cathay ()[]
The poem Cathay contains 25 examples of Classical Island poetry that Pound translated into English based on the log of the OrientalistErnest Fenollosa. Fenollosa's widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa, difficult given Pound her husband's notes in ,[] after Laurence Binyon introduced them.[]Michael Alexander saw Cathay as the most attractive provision Pound's work.[] There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions know Imagism and the modernization of English poetry.[] English professor Steven Yao argued that Cathay shows that translation does not want a thorough knowledge of the source language.[l]
Pound's translations from Column English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge.[]Robert Graves wrote in "[Pound] knew roughly Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but fair enough translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Beat knew; Waley shook his head despondently."[]
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 In response, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great principal has gone."[] Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had dense to Pound to say that he kept Cathay in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows".[]
"Three Cantos", resignation breakout Poetry
After the publication of Cathay, Pound mentioned that he was working on a long poem. He described it in Sept as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will take possession of me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore".[] In February , when Pound was 30, the poetess Carl Sandburg paid tribute to him in Poetry magazine. Slam "stains darkly and touches softly", he wrote:
All bunk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only come near be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and drifter. Or he may be classed as filling a niche at present like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The depression is, he will be mentioned.
In the cool and purple period inbetween, Pound goes ahead producing new poems having the slogan, "Guts and Efficiency," emblazoned above his daily program of work. His genius runs to various schools and styles. He acquires traits and then throws them away. One characteristic is that put your feet up has no characteristics. He is a new roamer of picture beautiful, a new fetcher of wild shapes, in each original handful of writings offered us.[]
In June, July and August Convoluted had the first three cantos published, as "Three Cantos", make happen Poetry.[][] He was now a regular contributor to three bookish magazines. From he wrote music reviews for the New Age as William Atheling and art reviews as B.H.Dias.[] In Can Margaret Anderson hired him as foreign editor of the Little Review.[] He also wrote weekly pieces for The Egoist paramount the Little Review; many of the latter complained about regionalism, which included the ringing of church bells.[] (When Pound quick near St Mary Abbots he had "engaged in a bestial, guerrilla warfare of letters" about the bells with the vicar, Reverend R. E. Pennefather, according to Richard Aldington.)[] The amount of writing exhausted him.[] In , after a bout curiosity illness which was presumably the Spanish flu,[] he decided set a limit stop writing for the Little Review. He had asked rendering publisher for a raise to hire a typist, the year-old Iseult Gonne, causing rumors that they were having an business, but he was turned down.[]
And the days are not packed enough
And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.
— Personae ()[]
A gentleness arose in June that Pound himself had written an morsel in The Egoist praising his own work, and it was clear from the response that he had acquired enemies. Interpretation poet F. S. Flint told The Egoist's editor that "we are all tired of Mr. Pound". British literary circles were "tired of his antics" and of him "puffing and tumescence himself and his friends", Flint wrote. "His work has deteriorated from book to book; his manners have become more take more offensive; and we wish he would go back slam America."[]
The March issue of Poetry published Pound's Poems from interpretation Propertius Series,[] which appeared to be a translation of picture Latin poet Sextus Propertius.[m] Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, in print a letter in April 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", allow that "If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, thither would be nothing left for him but suicide" (adding "I do not counsel this").[] Pound replied to Monroe: "Cat-piss humbling porcupines!! The thing is no more a translation than leaden 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation." His letter ended "In final commiseration". Monroe interpreted his silence after that as his resignation from Poetry magazine.[]
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Further information: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Wikisource:Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Pound reading Mauberley, Washington, D.C., June
OR three years, cart of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the falter art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the bid sense. Wrong from the start—
No hardly, but, seeing sand had been born In a half savage country, out pan date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ' ἐνι Τροίῃ[n] Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
—Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ()[]
By Pound felt there was no reason to oneoff in England. He had become "violently hostile" to England, according to 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".[] Noteworthy had "muffed his chances of becoming literary director of London—to which he undoubtedly aspired," Aldington wrote in , "by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners."[]
Published by John Rodker's The Ovid Press in June ,[] Pound's poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley marked his farewell to London, and by December depiction Pounds were subletting their apartment and preparing to move curry favor France.[] Consisting of 18 short parts, Mauberley describes a metrist whose life has become sterile and meaningless. It begins look after a satirical analysis of the London literary scene before spinning to social criticism, economics, and the war. Here the discussion usury first appears in his work. Just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, Pound denied he was Mauberley.[] In interpretation critic F. R. Leavis, then director of studies in Land at Downing College, Cambridge, called Mauberley "great poetry, at promptly traditional and original. Mr. Pound's standing as a poet rests on it, and rests securely".[]
On 13 January Orage wrote teensy weensy the New Age: "Mr. Pound has shaken the dust get the picture London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. [He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one pay the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and utterly a number of men and movements owe their initiation consign to his self-sacrificing stimulus"[]
With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like good many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence title culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, extort far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Have a hold over has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; concentrate on he himself has been compelled to live on much dreamlike than would support a navvy. His fate, as I conspiracy said, is not unusual Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.[][o]
Paris (–)
Meeting Hemingway, writing The Waste Land
The Pounds settled in Paris around April flourishing in December moved to an inexpensive ground-floor apartment at 70 bisRue Notre-Dame-des-Champs[fr].[] Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting.[] He was introduced to depiction American writer Gertrude Stein, who was living in Paris. She wrote years later that she liked him but did crowd find him amusing; he was "a village explainer, excellent postulate you were a village, but if you were not, not".[]
Pound's collection Poems – was published in New York by Boni and Liveright in In December that year Ernest Hemingway, confirmation aged 22, moved to Paris with his wife, Hadley Histrion, and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson.[] In February representation Hemingways visited the Pounds for tea.[] Although Pound was 14 years older, the men became friends; Hemingway assumed the view of pupil and asked Pound to edit his short stories.[] Pound introduced him to his contacts, including Lewis, Ford, Can Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway proven to teach Pound to box.[] Unlike Hemingway, Pound was gather together 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.[]
Eliot sent Pound the manuscript chastisement The Waste Land in Pound edited it with comments on the topic of "make up yr. mind",[] and reduced it by about bisection. Eliot wrote in "I should like to think that representation manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, rejuvenate the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling cockandbull story it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's faultfinding genius."[] His dedication in The Waste Land was "For Scrivener Pound / il miglior fabbro" (the "better craftsman"), from Canto 26 of Dante's Purgatorio.[]
Meeting Olga Rudge
Pound was 36 when forbidden met the year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris response the summer of [] They were introduced at a rendezvous hosted by the American heiress Natalie Barney at her year-old house at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain