Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885-1972), Ezra Pound, was an expatriate American poet, literary critic, a highly influential figure in the development of Imagism, as well as a major contributor to the early modernist poetry movement at the turn of the century.

He was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho Territory to Homer L. Pound and Isabel Weston. After college and a short career in teaching, he began his expatriate life in 1908, in Spain, Italy, and then London, settling in London until 1920. He had his first poetry collection, Lume Spento, printed in Italy in 1908. In 1914, he married wife Dorothy Shakespear and became editor of Little Review in 1917.

By 1924, he returned to Italy with Dorothy, where Pound became a fascist, his convictions polarizing his audiences during the shortwave broadcasts of his American-geared programming on Rome Radio during World War II. He was forced to return to the United States in 1945 because of the fascist propaganda he was extolling. Acquitted, but declared mentally insane in 1946, he was confined to Washington, D.C.’s St. Elizabeths Hospital. While at St. Elizabeths, he was awarded the Bolligen Prize for Poetry for his 1948 work, the Pisan Cantos. In 1958, a campaign for his release by his fellow writers resulted in his freedom from the asylum, and Pound returned to his adopted country of Italy, settling in Venice, where he passed away in 1972.

In relation to this collection, his circle of creatives included, but was not limited to: e e cummings, T.S. Eliot, Sheri Martinelli, Marion Morehouse, Basil Bunting, Louise Theis, and Babette Deustch.

Sources:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ezra-pound

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound

Richard Frary is a 1969 graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, and has given to the university's Sheridan Libraries an extensive collection of rare works by literary figures John Dos Passos and Rockwell Kent, as well as rare publications by poet Dylan Thomas and novelists William Faulkner and John Barth.