Ezra (Weston Loomis) Pound was a major modern American poet who lived from 1885 to 1972, and was enormously controversial due to his support of Fascism during World War II and his widely disseminated anti-Semitic views. He came from an impeccable line of Puritan forbears, but spent most of his life abroad, in England, France and Italy, where he died and is buried. As a co-founder of the Imagist movement, which sought to move away from the floridity of Victorian and Edwardian verse to a stronger, barer language, he influenced an entire body of American modern poetry in the twentieth century. As a critic and editor, he was responsible for promoting the work of such literary giants as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemmingway. After the First World War, his politics reflected his fear that the waging of war would become a full-time business upon which we would come to rely for our economic structure, and he began to look toward (unfortunately) Italy and Germany for a socialist model. Because of his anti-American broadcasts and correspondence, Pound was arrested for treason at the end of World War II and brought back to the United States. Declared mentally unfit for trial, he was committed to an insane asylum for the next twelve years. The campaign waged by fellow poets ended in having the first Bollingen Prize awarded to Pound; he was subsequently released from the hospital and he returned to Italy in 1958, dying there in 1972. The controversy of his personal politics has since interfered with a full appreciation of him as a poet, but if it is of any redeeming value, Ezra Pound himself wrote: “… Let the Gods forgive what I have made/Let those I love try to forgive what I have made…â€
