| āi cí lā · páng dé | |||
yuèdòupáng dé Ezra Poundzài诗海dezuòpǐn!!! | |||
庞德1885年10月30日出生于美国爱达荷州的海利镇。在去欧洲以前，他在宾夕法尼亚州立大学就学，在那里攻读美国历史、古典文学、罗曼斯语言文学。两年后，他转至哈密尔顿大学（Hamilton College）学习，1906年获硕士学位。1898年庞德首次赴欧，以后于1902年，1906年及1908年先后共四次去欧洲。1908年定居伦敦，以后一度成为伦敦文坛上举足轻重的人物。
1908年庞德的第一部诗集《灯火熄灭之时》（A Lume Spento）在意大利威尼斯自费出版。1909年，他的诗集《人物》（Personae）在伦敦出版。1910年他的文集《罗曼斯精神》（The Spirit of Romance）出版。文集内容主要是他的早期译作及他历年来学术研究的成果和见解。庞德在他早期诗作中就显示出独创精神和渊博的学识，1912年他成为芝加哥小型杂志《诗歌》驻伦敦通讯员。1914年他与多萝西·莎士比亚（Dorothy Shakespeare）结婚。
1915年庞德发表了他根据东方学者芬诺洛萨（Fenollosa）的遗稿而译成的中国古诗英译本《中国》（Cathay）及两个日本戏剧集。在伦敦期间他发表的另外两部著作是：《向塞克斯图斯·普罗佩提乌斯致敬》（Homage to Sextus Propertivs，1919）和《休·赛尔温·毛伯利》（Hugh Selwyn Mauberley，1920）。1921年庞德移居巴黎，1924年迁居意大利热那亚东南的拉巴洛。
在巴黎和伦敦期间除了继续从事创作外，他发掘和扶植人才，与欧美文学界人士广为交游，为打破英美文学，尤其是英美诗歌的沉寂局面，为促进美国文学的“复兴”作出了独特的贡献。他和雕塑家、画家、音乐家都有广泛的联系，对欧美各国现代主义思潮的形成和发展都起了相当重要的作用。庞德在1914年至1916 年间与爱尔兰诗人叶芝（W．B．Yeats）交往很密切。他敬佩叶芝，以叶芝为师。叶芝也在一定程度上受到他的影响。庞德曾帮助詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）出版《青年艺术家的肖像》，（A Portraitof the Artist as a Young Man）和《尤利西斯》（Ulysses），帮助艾略特整理删节《荒原》（The Waste Land）的初稿，并向出版社推荐出版。他在巴黎结识并帮助海明威，帮他出版了第一本书。
意象派是1909年至1917年间一些英美诗人发起并付诸实践的文学运动，其宗旨是要求诗人以鲜明、准确、含蓄和高度凝炼的意象生动及形象地展现事物，并将诗人瞬息间的思想感情溶化在诗行中。它反对发表议论及感叹。庞德在伦敦期间与希尔达·杜利特尔（Hilda Doolittle），理查德·奥尔丁顿（Richard Aldington）建立起了沙龙，并得到不少人的支持，其中有劳伦斯（D．H．Law-renoe），威廉·卡罗斯·威廉斯（William Carlos Williams）等，1902年庞德确定了意象派（imagism）这一名称，1913年3月归纳了意象派的几点禁例。庞德曾主编意象派刊物《自我中心者》（TheEgoist），并于1913年编选了第一本意象派诗选。象本世纪初许多喧嚣一时的西方文艺界流派一样，意象派没有盛行多久就被抛弃了。代之而起的是漩涡派（Vorticism），但漩涡派作为一种主张，和者甚寡，其影响很微弱。漩涡派的创作重点在于表现力量而不再是展现图象。庞德和漩涡主义的支持者在1914—1915年间办了一份杂志《风暴》（Elast）。他在创作中也遵循了漩涡派的一些主张。
在1924年离开巴黎后到第二次大战前夕庞德的注意力由文学创作逐步转向资本主义的政治经济问题。在文学创作的同时，他写了一些社会批评方面的文章；讨论贫困与繁荣、战争与和平、失业与高利贷等问题，同时也对物质主义和工业主义带来的人们心灵腐化问题进行了抨击。令人难以理解的是这些问题的研究最后竟使庞德走上了反犹太主义，为墨索里尼的法西斯国家社会主义唱赞歌的道路。
第二次世界大战时，庞德在罗马电台发表了数百次广播讲话，抨击美国的战争行动，攻击罗斯福的作战政策，赞扬墨索里尼，鼓吹墨索里尼的治国政策能促成一个没有贪婪和高利贷的社会。
庞德因上述原因于1943年被控叛国罪，1944年为美军所俘，监禁在意大利比萨（Pisa）俘虏营中，1945年他被押往华盛顿受审，以后他被宣布神经失常而免于受审。从那时起的十几年庞德是在精神病院中度过的。在被关押期间庞德继续翻译孔子的著作，并写出《诗章》第71—84章，即《比萨诗章》（The Pisan Cantos）。1949年这部作品获得了由美国国会图书馆颁发、由艾略特参加作评委的博林根诗歌奖（Bollingen Prize for Poetry），此事一度在美国引起很大争议。
1958年经过阿奇博尔德·麦克利什（Archibald McLeish）、罗伯特·弗罗斯特（Robert Frost），欧内斯特·海明威（ErnestHemingway）的斡旋，庞德未经审判而被取消叛国罪，返回意大利。1972年11月病逝于威尼斯。
在庞德获释的前后，他的一些作品继续得到发表。这些作品包括《埃兹拉·庞德书信集》（Letters of Ezra Pound，1907—1941），《文学论文集》（Literary Essays）1954年出版，《文选》（__Select__edProse 1909—1965），1973年出版。
庞德在现代诗歌界影响深远。1948年诺贝尔奖得主，大诗人T·S·艾略特的著名长诗《荒原》的副题就是：“献给埃兹拉·庞德，最卓越的匠人”，该诗曾得利于庞德的亲自修改。
庞德在促进中西文化交流方面作了很大努力。他的意象派作品中汲取了某些日本诗歌如俳句诗的写作形式及特点。他在长诗《诗章》中阐述孔子学说，在1915年出版的《中国》中收集并翻译了十几首中国古诗。庞德不太懂中文，他的译作是由日译本转译的。庞德还曾译过《大学》、《中庸》、《论语》等。在翻译过程中庞德得到了华盛顿一些专家学者的帮助，克服了各种困难。尽管人们可以对译文进行各种指摘，但庞德毕竟作了前所未有的尝试。除了翻译中国作品外，庞德也译过包括日本、希腊、意大利文学等多种语言的外国文学作品。就此而言，庞德也是一个有成就的翻译家。
庞德最著名的作品，要属意象派名作《在地铁站内》
Pound was the driving force behind several Modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism.
Early life
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin Thaddeus C. Pound. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. He studied for two years at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to Hamilton College, where he received his Ph.B. in 1905. He then returned to Penn, completing an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he was engaged for a time. H.D. also became involved with a woman named Frances Gregg around this time. Shortly afterwards, H.D. and Gregg, along with Gregg's mother, went to Europe. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908 he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice.
London
The cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine BLAST.Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. After moving to London, the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme encouraged Pound to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms and begin to remake himself as a poet. Pound believed William Butler Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England. Pound eventually became Yeats' secretary, and soon became interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During World War I Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese characters fascinated Pound. Eventually, Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the Ideogrammic Method. In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W. B. Yeats.
In the years before the First World War, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism, and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Jacob Epstein, Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that Pound described as “For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po), from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.". The volume includes works such as The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road. Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse translations celebrated for their ease of diction and conversationality. Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most successful realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no basis in the original texts though many critics argue that the fidelity of Cathay to the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter entitled "The Invention of China" in his The Pound Era contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a book about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.
The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.
Pari
In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians, and writers who were revolutionizing the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was also good friends with Basil Bunting and Ernest Hemingway, whom Pound asked to teach him to box. (Hemingway would later write, in A Moveable Feast, "I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook.") He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence," which introduced one of the major personas of the poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose and translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's life.
Italy
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Ezra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of the Book of Poetry (Shih Ching), in the Sacred Books of the East.On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors.
At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo, where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. Pound made his first trip back home to the U.S. in many years in 1939, on the eve of World War II, and considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. Aside from his political sympathy with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. His elderly parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in poor health and would have difficulty making the trip back to America even under peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his mistress Olga Rudge: Mary (or Maria) Rudge was a young woman in her late teens who had lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had difficulty relocating to America (even though she had American as well as Italian citizenship).
Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941. He became a leading Axis propagandist. He also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing, and he wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Pound believed that economics was the core issue at hand. Specifically, his talks were largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound was not the first prominent American to make this assertion; for example New York City Mayor John Hylan had publicly said the same thing back in 1922 when he said "these international bankers control the majority of the magazines and newspapers in this country." Pound believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and incorporated antisemitism into his denunciations of the war.
Ezra Pound - May 26, 1945.It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable, though it is clear that his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of books and pamphlets) did have some influence in Italy. The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government, and transcripts, now stored in the Library of Congress, were made of them. Pound was indicted for treason by the United States government in 1943.
On July 10, 1943, the Allied forces landed in Sicily and rapidly began to overrun the southern part of Italy. On July 25, 1943 King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini and dismissed him as the premier of the Kingdom of Italy. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was arrested and sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy (Abruzzo). About two months after he was stripped of power, Mussolini was rescued by the Germans in Operation Oak and relocated to the north, where he declared himself the President of the new Salò Republic. Pound played a significant role
in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945. On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work in progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1949.
St. Elizabeth
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After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when the Kingdom of Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Saló Republic, evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found incompetent to face trial by a special federal jury and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do appear to be those of a sane person. Treason is potentially a capital offense. Pound's controversial insanity plea is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author and collaborator Knut Hamsun, who was dubbed insane by embarrassed authorities despite evidence in the form of subsequent published material to the contrary.
Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum." Subsequently he returned to Italy, where he remained in exile until his death in 1972.
E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was given special treatment by colluding authorities, specifically Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote three books, received visits from literary figures and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife. The reliability of Torrey’s allegations has been questioned; other scholars have presented Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient, without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics.
Pound was also frequently visited by his protegé, a Library of Congress researcher named Eustace Mullins. Pound commissioned Mullins to write a book about the history of the Federal Reserve and to tell it like a detective story. Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels (the national debt did indeed rise astronomically because of the wars). The book, Secrets Of The Federal Reserve, charges that bankers hide behind the screen of the central banks and pull political strings to drive countries into the war, creating immense profits for themselves as the principal beneficiaries of wartime debt. Pound advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He favored government issued currency with no interest to pay, preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764, a system which provided more economic stability than any other 40-year period in American history.
Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of Thomas Jefferson, as well as with Benjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.
Pound was also befriended there by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a reassessment of Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the Pound Newsletter, which eventually led to the publication of the first guide to The Cantos, Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound had many friends and admirers among his fellow poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to Pound’s situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeth's," and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. The artist Sheri Martinelli, meanwhile, is believed to have inspired the love poetry in Cantos XC–XCV. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky were among Pound's visitors, as was Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983), and the Colonial French nonfigurative painter René Laubies, the first translator of the work of Pound into French (Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound, Paris: P.J. Oswald, 1958. 77 pages). In his Portraits et Aphorismes (2001) Laubies writes that he did not remember having any "difficulties returning to visit Pound at the Asylum of St. Elisabeths." He asked Pound whether the surroundings obstructed him: "Not at all, they are the only acceptable Americans." When Laubies told Pound that he was born in Saigon: "Ah, that's why! Only Europeans with a master key to the Suez Canal are worth something...." Charles Olson was a frequent visitor (Pound wrote in a note to his attorney that "Olson saved my life" by providing sane conversation. Olson eventually became disgusted with Pound's anti-Semitic statements and stopped his visits. Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.
Rudd Fleming, a professor at the University of Maryland, visited Pound often. They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles' Electra, which was published by Princeton University Press in 1989. Fleming stated, when asked about Pound's anti-semitism, that Pound considered it a mistake.
A statement from Pound's foreword to a collection of his prose writings (written on July 4th, 1972) would seem to support Fleming's assertion: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE."
Death
Grave of Pound on the cemetery island of San Michele, Venice.On his release, Pound returned to Italy continuing work on The Cantos. In 1972, two days after his 87th birthday, Pound died in Venice, where he is buried.
Poetry
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice composer, writing privately that he intended a revolt against the impressionistic music of Claude Debussy. An autodidact, Pound described his working method as "improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present 'laws'..." With only a few formal lessons in music composition, Pound produced a small body of work, including a setting of Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno," for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of François Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti, a setting of 11 poems by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300). Pound began composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, a London pianist and vocal coach. Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar Robert Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design.
During his years in Paris (1921–1924), Pound formed close friendships with the American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's touring partner, the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound championed Antheil's music and asked his help in devising a system of micro-rhythms that would more accurately render the vitalistic speech rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more elaborate than Stravinsky's benchmarks of the period, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere," one of the opera's key arias, at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88, moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25–28), making it difficult for performers to hear the current bar of music and anticipate the upcoming bar. Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview concerts of Le Testament, but insisted to Pound that the meter was impractical.
In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; no comfort zone for singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of troubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm carries the emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls for human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs, and counter-rhythms lurch against each other—an offense to courtly etiquette. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another melody," as Pound puts it, the work spawns a polyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable" rhythm conducted in the laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship between words and music.
After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a musician's music," he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's music since Thomas Campion.... Its sound has remained in my memory."
Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque pointillistic orchestration and derives its vitality from complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on extensions of melody. Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the opera's numbers are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time his relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky. Cavalcanti demands attention to its varying cadences, to a recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established laws of composition, history, physiology, reason, and love.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME," distinguishes his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently biased for complex, asymmetric, and fast tempi; it thrives on innovation and surprise. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches; it can accommodate older styles of music with their symmetry, repetition, and more uniform tempi, as well as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical micro-metrical divisions of rhythm created for Le Testament.
Legacy
Because of his political views, his support of Mussolini, his opposition to central banking (The Federal Reserve, The Bank of England...) and the charge of anti-Semitism, Pound acquired many enemies throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Historians and scholars generally agree, however, that he played a vital role in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. The location of Pound—as opposed to other writers such as T. S. Eliot—at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic Hugh Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement titled The Pound Era. The critic Marjorie Perloff has also insisted upon Pound's centrality to numerous traditions of "experimental" poetry in the 20th century. As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivists. The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of parataxis which had a major influence on his poetry. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century has been considered by some to be in his debt.
As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped shape the careers of some of the 20th century's most influential writers. These writers include W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Immediately before the first world war Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists (Pound coined the word). Pound did much to publicize the movement and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of the wider public (he was particularly important in the artistic careers of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis).
As a translator, Pound did much to introduce Provençal and Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. For example, he helped popularize major poets such as Cavalcanti and Du Fu. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the West to classical Japanese poetry and drama (e.g. the Noh). He also translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education and knowledge of Anglo-Saxon was in decline. In the early 1920s in Paris, Pound became interested in music, and was probably the first serious writer in the 20th century to praise the work of the long-neglected Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi and to promote early music generally. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects. Pound was also interested in mysticism and the occult, but biographers have only recently begun to document his work in those fields. Leon Surrette wrote extensively of Pound's involvement in mysticism in The Birth of Modernism.
__Select__ed work
Pound's works by year published (with links to years-in-poetry pages; cities are location first editions published):
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Ezra PoundWikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Ezra Pound1908 A Lume Spento, poems (Venice)
1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems (London).
1909 Personae, poems (London)
1909 Exultations, poems (London)
1910 Provenca, poems (Boston)
1910 The Spirit of Romance, essays (London)
1911 Canzoni, poems (London)
1912 Ripostes, poems (London)
1912 The Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations, (London)
1915 Cathay, poems / translations
1916: Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London)
1916 Certain noble plays of Japan: from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
1916 "Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.
1916 "The Lake Isle", poem
1916 Lustra, poems.
1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations
1918: Pavannes and Divisions, prose (New York)
1919 Quia Pauper Amavi, poems (London)
1918 Pavannes and Divisions, essays
1919 The Fourth Canto, poems
1920 Umbra, poems and translations (London)
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, poems (London)
1921 Poems, 1918–1921, poems (New York)
1922 The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations
1923 Indiscretions, essays
1923 Le Testament, one-act opera
1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays (Paris)
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems (Paris)
1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York)
1927 Exile, poems
1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, poems
1928 __Select__ed Poems, edited by T. S. Eliot (London)
1928 Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation
1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems (New York)
1930 Imaginary Letters, essays
1931 How to Read, essays
1933 ABC of Economics, essays
1933 Cavalcanti, three-act opera
1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems (New York)
1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems (London)
1934 ABC of Reading, essays
1935 Make It New, essays
1936 Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound
1936 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, essays
1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems (London)
1937 Polite Essays, essays
1937 Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation
1938 Culture, essays
1939 What Is Money For?, essays
1940 Cantos LII-LXXI, poems
1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le Cause della Guerra Presente, essays
1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A., prose
1947 Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest, translation
1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems (New York)
1950 Seventy Cantos, poems
1951 Confucian analects, translator
1953: The Translations of Ezra Pound, translations (London)
1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound, translation (London)
1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares, poems (Milan)
1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems
__Select__ed posthumous works and edition
1975: The Cantos (London)
1975: __Select__ed Poems, 1908-1959, poems (London)
1976: Collected Early Poems (New York)
1997 Ezra Pound and Music, essays
2002 Canti postumi, poems
2003 Ego scriptor cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, operas/music
See also
Modernist poetry in English
Further reading
Sieburth, Richard, ed. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108241-9
Bacigalupo, Massimo (1980). The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bischoff, Volker (1991). Ezra Pound and Criticism 1905–1985: A Chronicle Listing of Publications in English. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation
Bush, Ronald. "Art Versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos" in Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95.
Carpenter, Humphrey (1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Fisher, Margaret (2002). Ezra Pound's Radio Operas. Boston: The MIT Press.
Fisher, Margaret (2005). The Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera: Collis O Heliconi; settings of poems by Catullus and Sappho. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
Hughes, Robert (2004). Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
Hughes, Robert and Fisher, Margaret(2003). Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound. Emeryville: Second Evening Art.
Ingman, Michael (1999). "Pound and Music" in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kenner, Hugh (1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Laubies, René (1958). Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound; traduction de René Laubies. Paris: P. J. Oswald, 77 pages.
Longenbach, James (1991). Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oderman, Kevin (1986). Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.
Perelman, Bob (1994). The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stock, Noel (1970). Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Stevens, John (1986). Words and Music in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Surette, Leon (1994). The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. McGill-Queen's University Press.
Thomson, Virgil (1966). Virgil Thomson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hilary Clarke, The Fictional Encyclopaedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers (1990) Taylor & Francis.
Furia, Philip (1984). Pound's Cantos Declassified. ISBN 0271003731.
Note
^ http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/odd/archives/001381.asp
^ Monroe, Harriet (1913). "Poetry". (Chicago) Modern Poetry Association. p. 123.
^ Ezra Pound: Translations (New York: New Directions 1963), p.187
^ The Pound Era (New York: New Directions, 1971), p.199
^ Ira B. Nadel (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, page xxii. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-64920-X
^ Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism." The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-521-64920-X, ISBN 0-521-43117-4
^ "Milestones", Time Magazine, December 19, 1994. Retrieved on 2007-07-22.
^ "http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/crime/trial/other.html". pbs.org. Retrieved on February 25, 2008.
^ Mitgang, Herbert. "Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's insanity. New York Times, October 31, 1981. Retrieved on February 25, 2008.
^ Hamsun, Knut, Paa gjengrodde stier (Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1949). ISBN 82-05-16389-8, translated as On Overgrown Paths
^ Richard Douthwaite. Government-Produced Money (Chapter 3) in The Ecology of Money. Retrieved on 2007-06-01.
^ Rod Jellema "Rod Jellema on Ezra Pound" in Beltway: A Poetry Quarterly. Retrieved on 2007-06-04
^ Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound: __select__ed prose 1909-1965. New Directions, 3. ISBN 0-8112-0574-6.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af Ackroyd, Peter, Ezra Pound, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1980, "Bibliography" chapter, p 121