Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is one of the most influential, and most controversial poets of the twentieth-century. He is a major figure in 'modernist' literature - that is, experimental literature written during the first part of the twentieth century, renowned for his remarkable knowledge of poetic forms, his experiments in style, and his interest in world literatures. He is best known for the group he founded in 1913, which he named 'Imagism', and for his long poem, The Cantos, which he began around 1915 and left unfinished at his death in 1972. Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, and he grew up in Philadelphia. At the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College, he studied Romance literatures, and planned to write a doctoral dissertation on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright, Lope de Vega. Instead, he moved to London in 1908, to sit at the feet of W.B. Yeats, he later said, whom he considered the greatest living poet. His early verse shows the influence of the Victorian poet Robert Browning, and the late pre-Raphaelite poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as Yeats and the medieval poets he'd studied at university: the Provençal troubadours, François Villon,...