Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement. He was a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement until 1958. He is widely considered one of the most influential and most difficult poets of the 20th century; his contributions to Modernist poetry are enormous. Pound, along with Richard Aldington and other writers, founded the Imagist movement. He also helped found vorticism with Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound's life's work in poetry, The Cantos, remains a signal Modernist epic.