A GIRL
by: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
THE tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast--
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child -- so high -- you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
One of the 20th century's most influential voices in American and English literature, Ezra Pound was born in the small mining town of Hailey, Idaho
In 1907, after finishing college, Pound accepted a teaching job at Indiana's Wabash College. But the fit between the artistic, somewhat bohemian poet and the formal institution was less than perfect, and Pound soon left.
His next move proved to be more daring. In 1908, with just $80 in his pocket, he set sail for Europe, and landed in Venice brimming with confidence that he would soon make a name for himself in the world of poetry. With his own money, Pound paid for the publication of his first book of poems, "A Lume Spento."
Despite the fact that the work did not create the kind of fireworks he had hoped for, it did open some important doors for him. In late 1908, Pound traveled to London, where he befriended the influential writer and editor Ford Madox Ford, as well as William Butler Yeats. His friendship with Yeats in particular was a close one, and Pound eventually took a job as the writer's secretary, and later served as best man at his wedding.
Success Abroad
In 1909, Pound found the kind of success as a writer that he had wanted. Over the next year, he produced three books, "Personae," "Exultations" and "The Spirit of Romance," the last one based on the lectures he had given in London. All three books were warmly received. Wrote one reviewer: Pound "is that rare thing among modern poets, a scholar."
In 1912, Pound helped create a movement that he and others called "Imagism," which signaled a new literary direction for the poet. At the core of Imagism, was a push to set a more direct course with language, shedding the sentiment that had so wholly shaped Victorian and Romantic poetry.
Literature's Best Friend
Pound's influence extended in other directions. He had an incredible eye for talent and tirelessly promoted writers whose works he felt demanded attention. He introduced the world to up-and-coming poets like Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence, and was T.S. Eliot's editor. In fact, it was Pound who edited Eliot's "The Waste Land," which many consider to be one of the greatest poems produced during the modernist era.
Over the years, Pound and Eliot would become great friends. Early in his career, when Eliot abandoned his graduate studies in philosophy at Oxford, it was Pound who wrote the young poet's parents to break the news to them.
Pound's lineup of friends also included the Irish novelist James Joyce, whom he helped introduce to publishers and find landing spots in magazines for several of the stories in "The Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." During Joyce's leanest years, Pound helped him with money and even, it is said, helped secure for him an old pair of shoes to wear.
Outraged by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.
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| Sheet of toilet paper showing start of Canto LXXXIV, c. May 1945 |
In 1958, Robert Frost spearheaded a successful campaign to free Pound from the comfortable confines of St. Elizabeths. Pound returned to Italy immediately, and in 1969, published "Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII."
Later in his life, Pound analyzed what he judged to be his own failings as a writer attributable to his adherence to ideological fallacies. Allen Ginsberg states that, in a private conversation in 1967, Pound told the young poet, "my poems don't make sense." He went on to supposedly call himself a "moron", to characterize his writing as "stupid and ignorant", "a mess". Ginsberg reassured Pound that he "had shown us the way", but Pound refused to be mollified:
'Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions – the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,' [he] replied. Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.'
Pound passed away in Venice in 1972 and was buried on the cemetery island Isole di San Michele. Over the course of his long, productive lifetime, Pound published 70 books of his own writing, had a hand in some 70 others, and authored more than 1,500 articles.
