Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)

American avant-garde poet, critic, and translator, who exerted an enormous influence on the development of English and American poetry and criticism in the early 20th century. Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. From 1908 to 1920 he lived in London, where he served as a foreign correspondent for the American magazines Poetry and The Little Review. He was also associated with several influential small-circulation literary magazines in England. Pound championed and in some cases edited the works of several avant-garde authors writing in England, including the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and the Irish novelist James Joyce. Pound also set forth the theories behind the literary movement that came to be known as imagism. Pound's literary reputation was established very early, with the publication of Personae, a verse collection, in 1909. In 1920 Pound moved to Paris, where he became a leader of the American expatriate literary circle that included the writers Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Pound also worked for the American literary magazine The Dial; translated from Italian, Chinese, and Japanese literature; and completed several books of criticism and poetry, including Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). In 1924 Pound settled in Rapallo, Italy, and during World War II (1939-1945) he broadcast Fascist propaganda from Rome to the United States. He was arrested by the Americans in 1945, declared psychologically unfit to stand trial for treason, and confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. When he was released in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death. Portions of Pound's major work, Cantos, were first published in 1925; the first complete English edition of all the published segments was issued in 1970 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Pound drew his themes from Confucian ethics (see Confucianism), classical mythology, economic theory, and other seemingly disparate sources in his effort to interpret cultural history. His Letters and his Collected Poems were both published in 1950. His Literary Essays appeared in 1954, and his Translations appeared in 1963.