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Biography Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (n. 30 octombrie 1885 - d. 1 noiembrie 1972) a fost un poet american
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promotion of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."
His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
The critic Hugh Kenner said of Pound upon meeting him: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, Thaddeus C. Pound.[4] When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. In 1901 at the age of 15, he entered the University of Pennsylvania, but after studying there for two years transferred to Hamilton College, where he received his Ph.B. in 1905. He then returned to Penn, completing an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a short time. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, but when he allowed a stranded actress to spend the night in his room, the resulting scandal caused him to leave his teaching post after only four months, "all accusations", he later claimed, "having been ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin Quarter type.'"[5] He had been taken to Europe by relatives in 1898 and again traveled to Europe and Morocco in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, living first in Venice but eventually settling in London after spending a brief stint working as a tour guide in Gibraltar. Pound self-published A Lume Spento, his first published collection of short poems, while living in Venic.
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