Ezra Pound was born October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Wyncote, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Ezra's father Homer worked for the U.S. Mint. While in high school, Pound studied Latin, and this study moved him to concentrate on poetry and literary history. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle (both later to become, with Pound, prominent modernist poets). Pound transferred to Hamilton College in New York, graduated from there in 1905, and then returned to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue graduate study in languages, including old English, old French, Provençal, Italian, and Latin. He received his master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 and took a job teaching at Wabash College in Indiana. This teaching experience, however, was a disaster for the bohemian...