Ezra Pound, the Basics of his Life and Literary Works

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Works Cited

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Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but was raised and educated primarily in Pennsylvania. In 1908, when his future academic career ended without his consent, he went to Europe, spending approximately half a year in Venice Italy and then he eventually settled in London, where he befriended  his hero. A man named Yeats. (another famous author) From the years of 1908 to 1911 he published six collections of verse poetry, with most of it dominated by a love for earlier Italian poetry.  Under the influence of Maddox Ford and TE Hulme he quickly learned to modernize his style, and in 1912 single handedly launched the Imagist movement, advocating concreteness, economy, and free verse. He had an oriental passion with his brief Imagist lyrics (ex. 'In a Station of the Metro') and it soon leaded to the more dynamically avant manner of Vorticism. Association with Vorticist artists helped Pound to see how poems could be made up of juxtaposed masses and planes. These lessons were reinforced with Pound’s work on Ernest Fenollosa's versions of classical Chinese poems and literature, which he turned into the arousing free-verse lyrics of Cathay in 1915. Fenollosa had argued that Chinese written characters were ideograms--compressed and abstracted visual metaphors. In this interplay of concrete signs Pound saw the model for a new kind of poetry, dynamic and economical, which juxtaposed not only images but diverse 'facts’--allusions, quotations, fragments of narrative. Such a method, soon to be tried out in his major work The Cantos (on which he tentatively embarked in 1915), would permit the use of quotations from other languages and even gobbets of prose. Pound was a great innovator, and instigator in many ways.

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The range and brilliance of Pound's contacts in all the arts convinced him that London was to be the center of a new Renaissance. He cast himself in the role of impresario, editor, and advocate, contributing to Yeats's mature style, discovering and promoting Joyce and Eliot, advising an American businessman on the modern works of art to buy in London. But his hopes foundered in the waste of the First World War, and the consequent disappointment was to color the rest of his life's work. In the short term it provoked his first major poems, 'Homage to Sextus Properties' (1919) ...

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