It's the birthday of Ezra Pound, (books by this author) born 125 years ago today in Hailey, Idaho (1885). He was known as "the poet's poet" because he was so generous about promoting the work of other writers — including James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot.
In his early 20s, he started teaching literature at a small college in the Midwest. But he caused a scandal by allowing a stranded vaudeville actress to sleep over at his place. He was fired. But the college gave him the rest of his year's salary, & he headed off to Europe with it.
He believed that Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English, and he was determined to make himself an apprentice to Yeats. He found him, befriended him, worked as his secretary, and even lived with Yeats at his Sussex cottage for a while. Later, he married the daughter of Yeats's former lover.
In 1914, Pound met T.S. Eliot, and he campaigned to get "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" published in Poetry magazine. He's sometimes credited as "discovering" Eliot because of this.
He lived in England for eight years, and writers always hung out at his home. He moved to Italy and was living there when World War II began. He did radio broadcasts for the Italian government in which he condemned America and praised Mussolini, and he kept up these broadcasts even after the U.S. entered the war. He was arrested by the U.S., charged with treason, and placed in a cage on an American Army base near Pisa.
At the end of the war, he was taken back to the U.S. to stand trial. But then he was found mentally incompetent for a trial and instead sent to a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. He spent 12 years there, from 1946 to 1958. Friends, famous poets, and admirers streamed in to visit him while he was in the psychiatric hospital; regular visitors included Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and William Carlos Williams. Robert Frost campaigned for his release. Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry during his stay. The treason charges were eventually dismissed. Ezra Pound was declared incurably insane but not dangerous. When they let him out, he went straight back to Italy, and remained there until his death in 1972.
He spent most of his writing life on The Cantos, a modern epic. There are 109 completed Cantos; the first of The Cantos begins:
"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."
