Pound shaped modernism—and broadcast for Fascist Italy
American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) drove Imagism's spare precision and midwifed other modernists from London editorial desks. He later moved to Italy, pushed social-credit economics, and collaborated with Fascist regimes; the Pisan Cantos still won the 1949 Bollingen Prize amid fury.
He was born in a clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, where his father registered land claims, but his mother soon took him east, and he grew up near Philadelphia. His first publication, at eleven, was a limerick about William Jennings Bryan's 1896 defeat. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at fifteen, earned poor grades even in Latin, his major, moved to Hamilton College to read Provençal, Dante and The Seafarer, and hand-bound 25 poems as Hilda's Book for Hilda Doolittle, later the poet H.D.
As London foreign editor for American magazines, he championed Imagism's economy of language and helped launch H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway and Joyce. He got Joyce's Portrait serialised in 1914, placed Eliot's Prufrock in print in 1915 and began running Ulysses in instalments from 1918. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that escaping Pound's influence would be like crossing a blizzard without feeling cold. His own books include Ripostes of 1912, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley of 1920 and the Cantos, written over nearly five decades.
Blaming World War I on finance capitalism, which he called usury, he settled in Italy in 1924, promoted social credit, wrote for Oswald Mosley's papers and embraced Mussolini and Hitler. During World War II he recorded hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy and its German-backed successor, attacking Roosevelt, Britain and Jews and urging American soldiers to surrender.
Italian partisans captured him in 1945 and handed him to the US Army; held near Pisa, he spent three weeks in an open-air steel cage while still drafting cantos. Judged unfit to stand trial for treason, he was confined to St Elizabeths Hospital. The Pisan Cantos appeared in 1948 and won the Library of Congress's Bollingen Prize the next year, causing uproar. Released in 1958 after writers campaigned for him, he returned to Italy, gave the Fascist salute for photographers and died there in 1972.
Source: Ezra Pound
