Ezra Pound Biography Quotes 49 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho Territory, and grew up largely in Pennsylvania. He showed precocious interest in languages, prosody, and the literatures of Europe. His formal studies took him to the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College, where he read widely in Romance languages and medieval literature and began to shape the sensibility that would later drive his experiments with verse. A brief and unhappy appointment teaching at Wabash College in Indiana ended abruptly, and in 1908 he left the United States for Europe, a move that set the course for his career as one of the central figures of literary modernism.

London and the Making of a Modernist
Pound first reached Venice, where he published his debut volume, then settled in London in 1909. There he became deeply involved in the world of little magazines and avant-garde salons, finding kindred spirits among writers and critics such as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. Through essays and editorial work he helped articulate the tenets of Imagism, a program that advocated concision, clarity, and the precise rendering of the image. His poem In a Station of the Metro, with its compressed juxtaposition, became a touchstone of this approach. Restless with labels, he later aligned himself with Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, a broader aesthetic that sought an energized, angular modern art across media.

Pound was a nimble organizer. He funneled new writing from London to American journals, worked closely with Harriet Monroe and Poetry magazine, and contributed to The Egoist and The Little Review. He also sought out older poets he admired, serving as secretary to W. B. Yeats for several winters before the First World War. That apprenticeship in Yeats's orbit, coupled with his immersion in French symbolism and classical models, sharpened his sense that English-language poetry needed renovation from the ground up.

Champion of Others
More than most poets, Pound acted as a catalyst for others. He promoted and edited the work of T. S. Eliot, helping to shape The Waste Land into its 1922 form; he championed James Joyce, facilitating the serialization of Ulysses in The Little Review and helping arrange patronage and publication in difficult years. He encouraged William Carlos Williams to pursue an American idiom distinct from genteel tradition, and in the early 1920s he introduced Ernest Hemingway to writers and editors in Paris, pressing the virtues of economy and rhythm. Pound's interventions were often energetic, sometimes overbearing, but they were decisive in launching the careers of several of the century's most influential writers.

Major Works and Methods
Pound's own writing includes early volumes such as Personae and Exultations, but his lasting reputation rests on The Cantos, a lifelong, unfinished epic built from historical episodes, economic theories, quotations, and multiple languages. He wanted a poem capacious enough to hold a civilization's memory, from classical antiquity to the present, and he pursued an art of juxtaposition rather than linear narrative. He also worked as a translator and mediator of other traditions: Cathay reimagined Chinese poems from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa; his versions of Guido Cavalcanti and his involvement with Noh drama opened further channels between cultures. He described methods drawn from the Chinese written character and emphasized the musical phrase, aiming for a precision that could carry thought and emotion without ornament.

Personal Life
In 1914 he married Dorothy Shakespear, a painter associated with the same avant-garde circles. Their long marriage endured long stretches of separation and complexity. In Italy he began a lifelong relationship with the violinist Olga Rudge; with Rudge he had a daughter, Mary, while with Dorothy he had a son, Omar. Pound's domestic arrangements were divided between the households of Dorothy and Olga for decades, a circumstance that shaped his later life and travels. Despite the strain such arrangements could cause, both women were central to his work, practical affairs, and care in later years.

Paris, Rapallo, and Political Turn
After the war Pound moved to Paris in 1921, joining a community that included Joyce, Hemingway, and other expatriates. He soon left the city for the Italian town of Rapallo in 1924, seeking a quieter setting for writing and for a program of cultural activity that included support for contemporary composers and the study of early music. In Italy he increasingly devoted attention to monetary theory, railing against what he saw as usury and corruption in modern finance. This preoccupation fed into his public advocacy during the 1930s for Benito Mussolini's regime, a political turn that would overshadow his literary reputation. His writings and broadcasts from this period included anti-Semitic statements that became a persistent and damaging part of his public record.

War, Arrest, and The Pisan Cantos
During the Second World War Pound delivered English-language radio broadcasts from Italy in which he praised the Fascist government and denounced the Allies. The United States indicted him for treason. In 1945, as the war ended, he was taken into custody by American forces and confined near Pisa at a military detention camp. There, under harsh conditions, he began composing the sequence later published as The Pisan Cantos, which combine memory, remorse, and a wide array of literary and historical reference. The work showed a lyrical resilience and technical command that impressed many readers, even as the moral and political context of its making remained fraught.

St. Elizabeths, the Bollingen Prize, and Debates
Transferred to Washington, D.C., Pound was judged mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in 1946. Over the next dozen years he continued to write and receive visitors. Fellow poets such as William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, and others came to see him; lawyers, editors, and friends worked variously to improve his situation or to advocate for release. The publication of The Pisan Cantos brought him the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, an award administered at that time under the auspices of the Library of Congress. The decision provoked intense controversy over whether aesthetic achievement could be recognized apart from a writer's political actions. The prize committee stood by its judgment, but the dispute reshaped discussions of literature and responsibility in the United States.

Return to Italy and Final Years
In 1958, after more than a decade in the hospital, the legal proceedings against Pound ended and he was released. He returned to Italy, living mostly in Rapallo and later in Venice. His health declined, and long silences alternated with brief public appearances. In these years he worked intermittently on later sections of The Cantos, while friends, family, and editors helped manage his papers and publications. He died in Venice in 1972 and was buried on the island cemetery of San Michele.

Legacy
No account of twentieth-century poetry can avoid Pound's double legacy. As a maker, he forged a style that prized exactness, cadence, and collage, and he opened channels between English-language verse and the literatures of Asia and the Mediterranean. As an advocate, he made possible projects and careers from Yeats's late reinvention to Eliot's and Joyce's breakthroughs, and his counsel touched writers as different as Williams and Hemingway. At the same time, his embrace of Fascism and his anti-Semitic rhetoric remain inseparable from any honest evaluation of his life and work. Later generations grappled with both aspects: scholars mapped the reach of his innovations, while editors and biographers weighed the costs of his convictions. The result is a figure at once foundational and deeply troubling, whose influence on modern poetry is undeniable and whose political errors are equally indelible.

Our collection contains 49 quotes who is written by Ezra, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to Ezra: Marshall McLuhan (Sociologist), William Butler Yeats (Poet), Archibald MacLeish (Poet), Marianne Moore (Poet), Max Beerbohm (Actor), Amy Lowell (Poet), Edward Wadsworth (Artist), George Oppen (Poet), James Laughlin (Poet), Margaret Anderson (Editor)