“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures”
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Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos.
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culture · American poet and critic (1885–1972) · poet · literary critic · composer · translator · autobiographer · writer · economist · journalist · radio personality · literary historian · also Ezra Pound, Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound, Pound
Born 30 October 1885 · Died 1 November 1972 · Q163366
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2026· 6 entries
“s approach was hagiographic. He included in this approach Caroll F. Terrell”
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“Tell Omar I favour a defender who has written a life of J. Adams and translated Confucius. Otherwise how CAN he know what it is about?”
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“never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss”
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Public attention spiked: 3,782 Wikipedia readers in one day, 3.3× the usual 1,157, with 0 article edits. Coverage that week: “Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound’s Daughter and Defender, Dies at 101” (The New York Times).
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The New York Times: Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound’s Daughter and Defender, Dies at 101
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2018· 1 entry
The Guardian: Ezra Pound wrote the world’s single greatest poem, but is it wrong to love a fascist? | Ash Sarkar
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2017· 2 entries
The Guardian: The Bughouse by Daniel Swift review – Ezra Pound, antisemitic and in the asylum
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The Guardian: The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound – review
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2015· 3 entries
The Guardian: Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos edited by Massimo Bacigalupo review – fresh insights into an epic masterpiece
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The Guardian: Unseen Ezra Pound poem sold at auction
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The Guardian: Eliot, Pound and modern Poetry | Letters: Professor David Moody and Ann Monroe
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2014· 1 entry
The Guardian: Ezra Pound: Poet – Volume II, The Epic Years, 1921-1939 – review
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2012· 1 entry
The Guardian: Ezra Pound's daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet's legacy from fascists
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2008· 1 entry
"Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith
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2002· 1 entry
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Ezra Pound, the Poet and, Yes, Composer
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2000· 1 entry
“The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.”
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1999· 1 entry
Published “Natural History of Progression After PSA Elevation Following Radical Prostatectomy” in JAMA — cited 2,612 times.
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1996· 1 entry
Aged 100, and was buried next to Pound
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1972· 7 entries
Died 1972-11-01.
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“Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”
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An American Academy of Arts and Sciences committee, which included his publisher James Laughlin, proposed that Pound be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal
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And edited by Kenner and Eva Hesse, and Terrell's two-volume A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1980–1984)
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“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.”
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“My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.”
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“If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.”
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1971· 1 entry
Terrell founded the National Poetry Foundation to focus on Pound, and organized conferences on Pound in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990
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1967· 1 entry
During which Pound told Allen Ginsberg and Peter Russell that his own poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through"
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1966· 1 entry
Was admitted to the Genoa School of Medicine's psychiatric hospital for an evaluation after prostate surgery
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1963· 1 entry
Awarded Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1963).
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1961· 1 entry
Pound attended a meeting in Rome in honor of Oswald Mosley, who was visiting Italy
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1958· 3 entries
And returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called the United States "an insane asylum"
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MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment
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The men kept in touch; he wrote to Kasper on 17 April 1959: "Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don't play it
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1956· 2 entries
“Our Victorian forebears would have been greatly scandalized at the idea that one might not be free to study inherited racial characteristics”
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Over a speech he made in Clinton, Tennessee, and he was questioned about the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville
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1954· 1 entry
Hemingway told Time magazine "I believe this would be a good year to release poets
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1953· 2 entries
Kasper opened a far-right bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, that displayed Pound's work in the window
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Introduced by Kenner, and the following year Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, introduced by Eliot
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1952· 2 entries
The American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1), and St
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And 1955, but could not convince him to be more assertive about his release
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1950· 1 entry
Had written to Hemingway to complain that Pound's friends had not done enough
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1949· 1 entry
Pound's friends sought to rehabilitate him
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1948· 5 entries
Awarded Bollingen Prize (1948).
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In an effort to present his radio broadcasts as harmless, Olga Rudge self-published six of them (on cultural topics only) as If This Be Treason
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And by 1970 there were around ten a year
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Published “Relaxation Effects in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Absorption” in Physical Review — cited 5,999 times.
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As The Pisan Cantos, for which Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the American Library of Congress, leading to enormous controversy
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1946· 2 entries
Published “Resonance Absorption by Nuclear Magnetic Moments in a Solid” in Physical Review — cited 5,067 times.
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And gave Pound an advance copy, but Laughlin held back, waiting for the right time to publish
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1945· 2 entries
Pound was captured by the Italian Resistance and handed over to the U
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“thus the need to disseminate the Protocols. The intellectuals are capable of a passion more durable than emotional, but they need to understand the reasons for a conflict.”
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1942· 2 entries
“s Royal Finance Office that he had written the book for propaganda purposes in Italy”
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Pound told Italy's Royal Finance Office that he had written the book for propaganda purposes in Italy's interests
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1941· 1 entry
"by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners
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1938· 1 entry
Preceded by the publication in July that year of the Manifesto of Race
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1935· 1 entry
Pound wrote an essay, "What is Money For
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1932· 1 entry
That, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold"
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1928· 1 entry
And from 1930 she also rented the top floor of a house in Sant'Ambrogio, Caso 60, near the Pounds in Rapallo
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1927· 1 entry
For his translation of the Confucian classic Great Learning
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1926· 2 entries
Was unhappy that only one of her poems had appeared in Des Imagistes
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“international, wandering Loan Capital. Your enemy is not Germany, your enemy is money on loan. And it would be better to be infected with typhus ... than to be infected with this blindness which prevents you from understanding HOW you are undermined ... The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet.”
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1925· 1 entry
A new literary magazine, This Quarter, dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce
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1924· 3 entries
And 1927, Pound said The Cantos was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial, and "[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue":
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And through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf
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“[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue”
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1922· 2 entries
Apparently disliked that so many Jews were contributing to The Dial, and, in 1939, when he read his poetry at Harvard, he was said to have included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews
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Pound abandoned most of his work and began again
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1918· 1 entry
After a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish flu, he decided to stop writing for The Little Review
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1912· 1 entry
And 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art
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1911· 1 entry
Which showed that his main source of income was his father
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1909· 2 entries
“Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy.”
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Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in 1914
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1907· 1 entry
Where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke
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1906· 1 entry
Registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe
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1905· 1 entry
With a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who later wrote under the name "H
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1902· 1 entry
And the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades
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1901· 1 entry
At 15 years old, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
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1897· 1 entry
Aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot
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1893· 1 entry
The family bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in nearby Wyncote
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1892· 1 entry
And the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893
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1885· 2 entries
Born 1885-10-30.
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In a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory as the only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston, who married in 1884
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