American poet, translator, and editor; the principal organizer of Anglo-American literary modernism in the decade before and after the First World War, the author of The Cantos, and — in the other half of any honest account — a propagandist for Italian fascism whose wartime broadcasts on Rome Radio led to his 1945 indictment for treason and thirteen-year confinement at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. The work and the politics cannot be disentangled, and the century of criticism since has been an extended argument about what to do with that fact.
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, raised in suburban Philadelphia, took a degree in Romance languages at Hamilton College, and in 1908 sailed for Europe, settling first in London and then, after 1920, in Paris and Rapallo. The London years — 1908 to 1920 — are the decisive ones for twentieth-century poetry. Pound was the editor who got Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock into print, the reader who cut The Waste Land from a sprawling draft to its published form (Eliot's dedication names him il miglior fabbro, the better maker), the advocate who extracted James Joyce from obscurity and serialized A Portrait of the Artist in The Egoist, the mentor who sharpened the late poetry of Yeats, and the theorist behind Imagism (1912) and Vorticism (1914), the two programmatic movements from which most of what is now called modernist poetry descends. "Make it new" is his slogan.
The poetry of this period — Ripostes (1912), Cathay (1915, adapted from the notebooks of the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) — established a compressed, image-led, musical line that was the principal technical resource for the generation after him. Cathay in particular, though Pound did not read Chinese, transformed the English poetic line through Chinese example and gave Anglo-American poetry a new model of restraint.
The Cantos, which he worked on from 1915 until the last drafts before his death in 1972, are the unfinished long poem of his life: 116 cantos across some 800 pages, structured as what he called "a poem containing history," drawing on Homer, Dante, Confucian classics, Provençal troubadour poetry, Renaissance banking documents, Jefferson's letters, and — notoriously — anti-Semitic and Mussolinian material from the 1930s and 1940s. The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV–LXXXIV), written while Pound was caged by the U.S. Army in an open-air detention camp near Pisa in 1945, contain some of the most admired lyric passages in twentieth-century American poetry and were awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 — a decision that produced the most important literary controversy of the postwar American academy, since the poet had at the time been declared unfit to stand trial for treason and was confined at St. Elizabeths.
From the early 1930s onward Pound was a committed supporter of Mussolini, a crank economist of the Social Credit school, and an anti-Semite of the most virulent kind. Between 1941 and 1943 he made some 125 radio broadcasts from Rome attacking Roosevelt, American Jews, and the Allied war effort. Captured by Italian partisans and turned over to U.S. forces in 1945, he was indicted for treason, found mentally incompetent to stand trial, and confined at St. Elizabeths until 1958, when a campaign led by Eliot, Frost, Hemingway, and others secured his release. He returned to Italy, gave a late interview expressing the view that his anti-Semitism had been "a suburban prejudice" and that his life's work had been "a botch," and died in Venice in 1972.
Pound is the hardest case in the modernist canon. The technical influence on English-language poetry is equalled perhaps only by Eliot's. The political and moral record is unambiguous. No serious reader has been able to settle the two into a comfortable relation, and the difficulty is part of what any engagement with the work now has to take up.