One of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century, Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Idaho in 1885. His family soon moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Pound grew up. In college at the University of Pennsylvania, he met Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams. Pound and these two poets became friends and colleagues in the burgeoning "Modernist" movement. Pound transferred to Hamilton College before returning to the University of Pennsylvania for postgraduate studies in Provencal.

Pound never received his Ph.D., and after one disastrous year of teaching college in Indiana he moved to Europe in 1908. Settling in Venice, Pound published his first book of poems, A Lume Spento, there before moving on to London. In London, Pound used his forceful personality to insert himself into the avant-garde literary scene. In the twelve years he spent in London, Pound helped wrest literature from...