1885-1972
Poet

Champion of Modernism.

Ezra Pound's odyssey of ideas took him far from his birthplace in Idaho and changed American literature irrevocably. He had an uncanny eye for talent. During the 1910s and 1920s he was a champion of innovative new writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and William Carlos Williams. During the 1940s and 1950s Pound's ongoing epic poem, The Cantos (1917- 1969), had a major influence on a whole new generation of poets. Yet the American public read little of his poetry and knew of him mainly as the poet who had been arrested for treason.

Expatriate in Wartime.

When World War II broke out, Pound had been living in Europe since 1908 and in Rapallo, Italy, since 1924. During the 1930s he began dabbling in economics and political theory. His obsession with these subjects...