Ezra Pound Biography

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Ezra Pound

Visionary, literary pioneer, traitor, poseur, genius. All of these terms have been used at one time or another to describe Ezra Pound, considered one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. A controversial figure within modern poetry, Pound has also been one of its most important contributors. His Cantos, a half-century attempt at codifying his chaotic world in verse, is considered one of the premier achievements of modernism, indeed of poetry from any age, yet one of the least-read "great" poems in the English canon. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot declared that Pound "is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual." Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed this appraisal in Remembering Poets, noting that "Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry possible in English."

The importance of Pound's contributions to the arts and to the revitalization of poetry early in the twentieth century has been widely acknowledged; yet in 1950, Hugh Kenner could claim in his groundbreaking study The Poetry of Ezra Pound, "There is no great contemporary writer who is less read than Ezra Pound." Pound never sought, nor had, a wide reading audience; his technical innovations and use of unconventional poetic materials often baffled even sympathetic readers.

Read the rest of this Biography with our Ezra Pound Access Pass.