Homesick After His Own Kind -- Ezra Pound
Now, I'd heard the name before, but I knew next to nothing about him -- that he was a poet about sums it up-- despite my one college-level class in poetry. But here he was, popping up in the biographies of Yeats and Frost and in connection with other literary luminaries such as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, to name just two.
In fact, Hemingway once wrote of Pound: "Any poet born in this century or in the last ten years of the preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked. It as if a prose writer born in that time should not have learned from or been influenced by James Joyce or that a traveller should pass through a great blizzard and not have felt its cold or a sandstorm and not have felt the sand and the wind."
So I turned to my genealogy site to look him up, and sure enough, he shows up in our children's lineage as another one of those double-digit cousins many times removed. (And I'm starting to get a bit of a hold on those relational terms.)
Before trying to find out about Pound's life, I tried to find quotes associated with him that I might know. I found lots of quotes, but none that had appeared on a poster or mug like Frost's words, or in fact, appeared anywhere I remember before working on this post. I did find a couple I liked, though.
-- "Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
-- "No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
-- "Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
Pound was born in 1885 in the town of Hailey, Idaho territory His immediate ancestors worked as government employees. His mother didn't particularly like Hailey and moved with him to New York when he was 18 months old. His father followed later and took a job at the Philadelphia Mint. He and the family eventually settled in Jenkintown, PA.
He briefly attended a military academy and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he proved to be a mediocre student. During his scholastic career he joined his parents and an aunt for a couple of European tours. He eventually wound up graduating from a private liberal arts college in New York state.
After graduation, he took up teaching at a small, church-related college in Indiana, but not for long as he repeatedly violated college rules, and his employment was terminated.
From there he moved to Europe and began writing poetry in earnest. In 1908 he moved to London. While there, he continued to write and publish his verse, became a literary critic, began hanging out with the literary crowd there, meeting many of the writers he would later mentor and promote as an editor for various publications.
He helped found the Imagist movement in poetry, which as the name implies, encouraged writers to create powerful images created through carefully chosen wording whose rhythm evoked musical phrases. For example, after alighting from a train in the Paris Underground, he began noticing the faces flowing around him. He captured the experience in a two-line poem reminiscent of a haiku:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Not all Imagist poetry is so sparse, but you get the idea.
But by World War II, Pound had become enamored of fascism and moved to Italy to support Mussolini. He even made anti-American and antisemitic radio broadcasts aimed at reaching American and Jews. He would later renounce his antisemitism -- though not all are convinced of that -- but not fascism. He even had kind words about Hitler.
This did not endear him to American authorities. He wound up being imprisoned and was sent to Washington, D.C., near the end of 1945. He was charged with treason and examined by three psychiatrists who pronounced him unfit for trial. Even his friends in the literary community doubted his sanity, with Hemingway writing, "He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of…. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warping and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis."
He would spend 13 years in a mental institution, writing the whole time. His work from that period was noticed and honored and nominated for honors, but his past meant he would be denied most of the awards and the others would be considered controversial. After his release he returned to Italy where he would die and be buried.
This little treatise is merely part of the skeleton of Pound's life, with most of the bones missing. Yet his work endures.
Before I go, I want to leave you with the poem that forms the title of this post. Having been written in 1907, I can't help but think it foreshadowed much of his life:
In Durance
I am homesick after my own kind,
Oh, I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,
But I am homesick after my own kind.
Image: Ezra Pound, photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, c. 1913. Retrieved from www.britannica.com/biography/Ezra-Pound#/media/1/473055/232554 on the date of this post.
Comments
Post a Comment