FLUXEUROPA: EZRA POUND

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EZRA POUND (1885-1972)

"Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe."

EZRA POUND, poet and midwife to the avant-garde, was a human focus of the creative tension between tradition and modernity, and, as such, of particular interest to this e-zine.

He was born in Idaho in 1885 and his formal education included a study of the Provençal troubadours with whom he recognised a particular affinity. In 1908 he came to Europe, settling briefly in Venice and then moving on to London. He worked as secretary to W B Yeats and established himself as a poet and literary scholar, becoming a key figure in the literary scene. He also took a keen interest in modernist visual art and was an important contributor to Wyndham Lewis' Blast.

From 1920-1924 he was based in Paris where he took a keen interest in Dadaism and Surrealism, and he wrote for André Breton's magazine, Littérature, to which Drieu La Rochelle also contributed. He also did research there for The Cantos, the long historical poem which he had begun during the First World War and which became the major work of his life.

From 1924-1945 he lived in Italy, writing books, working on The Cantos and promoting Social Credit. Like T E Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, Pound viewed contemporary art as reflecting a cultural sickness, and strove for an assertive, sculptural art with clean clear lines, qualities which he associated with socio-economic and political health and which he recognised, for example, in the Quattrocento.

His economic and political beliefs led him during the Second World War to broadcast for Rome Radio. In 1945 he was arrested for treason and, at the age of sixty, was incarcerated in an outdoor cage in conditions which induced a nervous breakdown. He was declared unfit for trial on the grounds of insanity, a convenience for the US Government which was spared the embarrassment of executing their most famous contemporary poet. In 1958 the charge was dropped and Pound was released. He returned to Italy, his spiritual home, and died in Venice in 1972.

Pound's literary life was a quest for the threads of the continuum which, at an early date, he had enshrined in his concept of 'the Vortex' (a term he coined to describe Lewis' early artistic movement) and exemplified by his interest in both the Quattrocento and Dada.

Richard Humphreys (essay in Pound's Artists, Tate Gallery Publications, 1985) talks of Pound looking for the common denominators which "gave such eclectic tastes cohesion", and the way in which the pagan tradition of the return "was a vital source of his vision."

Whilst trailblazing modernist cultural styles, Pound and those with whom he was associated (Hulme, Lewis and T S Elliot) did not subscribe to the progressivist assumptions of the wider modernist ideology, whilst many of their attitudes and stylistic devices (fractured narrative, allusiveness etc) establish them as precursors of the post-modern.

Rik 12 February 1996

EZRA POUND (1885-1972)

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