EZRA POUND

Like James Joyce, the American poet Ezra Pound favoured exile from his native land, first in England, then on the Continent, and also, like Joyce, he was multilingual, a scholar and translator. But, unlike Joyce, he was a great poet, perhaps the greatest poet in English of his generation, if we discount men like Auden, Eliot, and Yeats, as I, for one, would be only too prepared to do!

However that may be, he dedicated himself with a single-minded fidelity to the production of his poems, many of which, in free verse and unrhymed, are technically way ahead of his contemporaries, including Eliot, and even after incarceration in a lunatic asylum in his native America for alleged insanity, he continued with his principal vocation, producing, in the late Cantos, work of undoubted poetic quality, even if, at times, somewhat obscure, arcane, and over-complex, not to mention over-politicized.

But, then, Ezra Pound was a political animal, his wartime collaboration with Italian Fascism, which took the unusual form of Social Credit broadcasts to the U.S.A., having got him into deep trouble when the Americans eventually liberated Italy, trouble which was only partly mitigated by his apparent insanity, with consequences already noted.

Doubtless Pound's standing as a poet suffered greatly in the West in view of his war-time sympathies, and his twelve-year spell behind hospital bars could hardly have enhanced or restored it. The popular image of a cranky old man who wrote some nice lyric poems in his youth persists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. And yet, if America's greatest succeeding poet, Allen Ginsberg, owes anything to any of his predecessors, it must surely be to Ezra Pound for liberating poetry from the straitjacket of bourgeois form in which it had traditionally languished, a captive to philistine conventions.