“Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.” — Ezra Pound
I know Pound through his reputation for being extremely generous and supportive of up-and-coming artists. He was like a relentless bull-dog manager for people whom he thought were talented. He had a very controversial life. He defended fascism, and was very much anti-war. When World War II broke out he was arrested in Rome and incarcerated. I also know that he pled insanity and was locked up in a mental institution in the US for over 10 years. I believe he was paraded in a cage through the streets of Italy.
I know that he was instrumental in nurturing young up-and-coming poets and authors (not even just nurturing: more like bullying other people to read the works of the likes of Joyce and Eliot. He was their first champions)
But I don’t know much about his actual poems and who he was as a writer.
I fully admit that I am intimidated by Ezra Pound, and I don’t know where to start.
all i can say is the picture of his face on the link is amazing. what an amazing amazing face.
Jason Robards would have made a great Pound. There seems to be a strong resemblance. That craggy face.
oh my god, yes!
Dearest: good bio. of Pound by Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character. Early Cantos are the most accessible. Later stuff is as heavy going as Finnegans Wake. In a station at the metro is one of his best poems. Virulent anti-semite [as was Eliot]and became a complete nutcase, writing economic pamphlets and kowtowing to Mussolini. I just finished reading the letters of Maud Gonne’s daughter Iseult to Yeats and Pound [she had a brief affair with him in 1918 before she married Francis Stuart]. He was so generous of his time and talent in support of his modernist friends, that he is forgiven much. love, dad
Thanks, Dad.
I’ll search out some of those early cantos. The sections where he shows up in the James Joyce bio are just awesome – Pound sounds tireless. And generous.
I’m not a great Pound Fan, but I’ve found his Cantos are a pretty good place to start. He was a pretty good poet but, as has been mentioned before, his later poems are like reading the literary version of a Congressional Hearing. He was, at many points in his life, a raging whackadoodle, but (again, as was mentioned before) he did give many young writers a real boost in their careers. Those I can recall him helping were Wendy Carlos Williams, Yeats, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.
I am an Eliot fan and one of the more interesting books I have is a copy of the original pages from Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which Pound proofread. The book has on one page the original Eliot menuscript with Pounds comments and editing marks and one the facing page the poem as it was published after the editing. The book not only gives a great insight into how a a poem like “The Waste Land” evolves but also into what Pound thought of Eliot’s writing and some ideas he had on poetry.
Hope some of this helps.