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Ezra Pound (1885–1972) ranks among the most influential English-language poets of the twentieth century. His influence stems partly from his efforts to facilitate intellectual and artistic exchange among major figures on either side of the Atlantic. He aggressively promoted the work of many writers whom we most closely associate with literary Modernism. Perhaps most famously, Pound edited T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem of 1922, The Waste Land. But aside from his support of others, Pound’s influence also comes from the radical ingenuity of his own poetry, and particularly from his career-spanning project, The Cantos. He was also one of the originators of the Imagism movement. Imagist poems like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” sought to isolate a single image or experience and document it in a concise and concrete style. 

Though raised and educated in the United States, Pound spent most of his adult life abroad, in England, France, and Italy. His support for Mussolini’s Fascist regime and of Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s and his paid participation in radio broadcasts for the Italian government during World War II led to his being arrested and charged with treason by the U.S. authorities in 1945. Eventually found to be mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound spent over a dozen years in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., until his release and return to Italy in 1958. Pound’s antisemitism and other political and economic views continue to repulse many scholars and readers, but to others, he remains a formidable figure in the history of twentieth-century poetics in spite of his repellent views on many topics.

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