Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include:
Ripostes (1912) (my personal favourite)
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
and the unfinished 120-section epic,
The Cantos (1917–69).
Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of
several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the
work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's
Ulysses.
Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are
attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He
introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their
books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he
advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."
