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· American

Ezra Pound

Modernism's impresario — editor of Eliot, publisher of Joyce, Hemingway's line-cutter, and the era's most brilliant, most compromised poet.

2 books on our shelves

In images

Details

Lived
1885–1972
Born
30 October 1885
Birthplace
Hailey, Idaho
Died
1 November 1972 · aged 87
Place of death
Venice, Italy
Nationality
American
Married
Dorothy Shakespear · 1914–1972
Children
Mary de Rachewiltz, Omar Pound
Roles
AuthorPoetEditorCritic
Also known as
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

About Ezra Pound

No single person did more to build modern literature than Ezra Pound, and almost no one did more to damage his own place in it. From London and then Paris, he operated as the movement's one-man infrastructure: he edited The Waste Land into its final shape (Eliot's dedication — 'il miglior fabbro,' the better craftsman — was earned), championed Joyce's Ulysses into print, drilled the young Hemingway in cutting every spare word, and invented or promoted half the era's -isms.

His own work ran from the perfect small machines of Imagism to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — his savage farewell to a civilization that had fed a generation to the war — and then into The Cantos, the sprawling, decades-long 'poem including history' that is by turns the summit of modernist ambition and a cautionary tale about it.

The life ran ahead of the work and then off the road entirely. Pound spent the Second World War broadcasting from Mussolini's Italy, was arrested for treason in 1945, and passed twelve years in a Washington asylum before a final, mostly silent decade back in Italy. The arguments about the man continue elsewhere; what is beyond argument is the debt — Eliot's, Joyce's, Hemingway's, and modern poetry's own. We shelve him as the era knew him: at the center of everything.

Ezra Pound, illustrated

A few scenes from Pound's life, drawn for The Paris Atlas — illustrations, not photographs.

Ezra Pound as a young poet.
Ezra Pound holding forth.
Ezra Pound at work on a manuscript.
Ezra Pound in a café chair.
Ezra Pound in old age, at a café.
Ezra Pound in Venice.
Illustrations — The Paris Atlas

Life events

  1. 1885

    Born 30 October in Hailey, Idaho — a mining town the most European of American poets never stopped surprising people with.

  2. 1908

    Sails for Europe; prints his first book, A Lume Spento, at his own expense in Venice, then lands in London and talks his way to the center of English letters.

  3. 1912

    Launches Imagism with H.D. and Richard Aldington — the small perfect machines that stripped Victorian upholstery out of the poem.

  4. 1914

    Marries Dorothy Shakespear; agitates in BLAST with Wyndham Lewis; begins the foreign-editing that fed modernism's little magazines.

  5. 1915

    Cathay — the Chinese translations that remade free verse in English.

  6. 1920

    Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: eighteen pages of farewell to London and to a civilization that fed a generation to the war.

  7. 1921

    Moves to Paris — the studio at 70bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, furnished with packing crates and Japanese paintings.

  8. 1922

    Edits The Waste Land into its final shape — Eliot's dedication, il miglior fabbro, was earned — and founds Bel Esprit, the subscription scheme to free Eliot from his bank.

    — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

  9. 1923

    Takes boxing lessons from the young Hemingway, gamely and without natural gift, among the canvases.

    — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

  10. 1924

    Leaves Paris for Rapallo, Italy — the memoir's warm portrait closes here.

  11. 1925

    A Draft of XVI Cantos — the 'poem including history' begins its half-century.

  12. 1941–1943

    The wartime broadcasts on Rome Radio against the Allied war effort — the years the rest of the record never escapes.

  13. 1945

    Arrested for treason; held in an open cage at Pisa, where he writes the Pisan Cantos.

  14. 1946–1958

    Twelve years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington; the 1949 Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos ignites a national argument about the man and the work.

  15. 1958

    Charges dropped; returns to Italy, and to a final decade of mostly silence.

  16. 1972

    Dies in Venice on 1 November; buried on the island of San Michele.

Ezra Pound quotes

Verbatim, as recorded by the witnesses of the era — sources on every quotation.

I have specialised in genius all my life.
— Ezra Pound, to Sisley Huddleston — Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928), asked how he detects genius

Featured in these books

Cover of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

How Ezra appears in its pages: The most generous writer in the book — founder of Bel Esprit, the subscription fund meant to free T. S. Eliot from his bank job.

The full portrait — Ezra Pound in A Moveable Feast

The most generous writer in the book — founder of Bel Esprit, the subscription fund meant to free T. S. Eliot from his bank job.

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Ezra is the book's saint — the man who, in Hemingway's accounting, spends a fifth of his time on his own poetry and the rest getting his friends published, fed, and out of trouble. He edits, promotes, lends, and founds Bel Esprit, a subscription scheme to free T. S. Eliot from his job at Lloyds Bank so he can write full time. In return Hemingway teaches him to box, with mixed results, in a studio full of Japanese paintings.

What Pound wants is other people's best work in print, and the memoir — so hard on nearly everyone — can find almost nothing to hold against him. He is the friend who taught the narrator to distrust adjectives, and the portrait is the warmest Hemingway ever wrote of another writer.

How the book draws them

  • The sketchThe pointed beard, the unruly hair, the energy of a man forever halfway out of his chair on someone else's errand — the book draws him fast and spends its care on his conduct.
  • The boxingAn unpromising pupil who never once quit: willing to be hit, anxious to do it properly, sparring gamely in his own studio while visitors watched.
  • The temperamentKinder about people than the narrator can manage, and harder on bad writing than anyone else in the book.
  • The studioAs modest as the rue de Fleurus was grand — hung with Japanese paintings, furnished plainly, and doubling as the boxing gym where the lessons happened among the art.
  • The lessonThe standing instruction to distrust adjectives — delivered less as a style note than as a moral position, and kept for life.
  • The one flawHis taste in people errs, if anywhere, on the side of everyone: he vouches warmly for visitors the narrator dislikes on sight, and the book counts even that against nobody but the visitors.

At a glance

In the book
'Ezra' — poet, editor, and the era's chief benefactor
Where he appears
'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit,' with the studio on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
The real person
Ezra Pound · 1885–1972 · Hailey, Idaho
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Within the book's frame the ending is gentle: Bel Esprit never quite frees Eliot (The Waste Land's prizes and a patron do it instead, the chapter notes wryly), and Pound leaves Paris for Rapallo, Italy in 1924. The memoir closes its account there, with the generosity intact.

The rest of Pound's life is the era's hardest story, and the memoir — written while Pound was still alive — chooses not to tell it. His wartime radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy, the treason indictment, and the twelve years in St. Elizabeths Hospital are covered on his own page; Hemingway, for his part, publicly supported the campaign for his release in the 1950s. The chapter stands as a deliberate record of the man Pound was in 1922, kept separate from what came after.

More people from A Moveable Feast

People they knew

Documented connections — every one carries its source.

Illustrated portrait of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

  • Author
  • Journalist

Mentored · 1922

Pound drilled the young Hemingway in cutting every spare word; Hemingway repaid the editing lessons by teaching Pound to box.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

Met · 1922

Met within weeks of Hemingway's arrival in Paris; Pound edited him, promoted him, and took boxing lessons in exchange — the era's fairest trade. The memoir's portrait of Pound is the warmest Hemingway ever wrote of another writer.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Illustrated portrait of James Joyce

James Joyce

  • Author
  • Poet

Met · 1920

Pound championed Joyce for years by post — serializations, subsidies, publishers — before they finally met at Sirmione in 1920; it was Pound who pointed Joyce toward Paris weeks later.

— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959)

Illustrated portrait of T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

  • Poet
  • Critic
  • Editor
  • +2

Collaborated with · 1922-01

Eliot finished a draft of The Waste Land at Lausanne in late 1921 and stopped in Paris on the way home in January 1922, where he and Pound worked the poem into the shape it was published in. The printed dedication, il miglior fabbro, is Eliot's acknowledgement of the cutting.

— T. S. Eliot: the life, with timeline, Timeline, September 1921 and January 1922

Met · 1914-09

They met in London in September 1914, a month after Eliot reached England. Pound sent "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe's Poetry, which printed it the following June — Eliot's first appearance in a magazine of any standing.

— T. S. Eliot: the life, with timeline, Timeline, 1914 and 1915

Illustrated portrait of D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

  • Author
  • Poet
  • Critic
  • +2

Met · 1909

They met in November 1909 through The English Review circle, at one of Violet Hunt's at-homes. Lawrence described the evening in a letter to Louie Burrows dated 20 November 1909. The two writers never became close.

— The English Review: An Introduction; John Worthen, Extended Biography of D. H. Lawrence

Illustrated portrait of Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney

  • Author
  • Poet
  • Salon host
  • +2

Met · 1920

Pound was one of the writers Barney received at 20 rue Jacob during his Paris years, in a room she ran expressly to get American, British and French writers reading and translating one another. The start year is approximate: the Library of Congress guide names him among her regular guests without dating the introduction.

— Natalie Clifford Barney — French Women & Feminists in History: A Resource Guide

Illustrated portrait of Nancy Cunard

Nancy Cunard

  • Poet
  • Publisher
  • Printer
  • +4

Collaborated with · 1930–1934

Cunard's Hours Press printed A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930, the first collected edition of Pound's first thirty cantos. He contributed to Negro: An Anthology four years later and answered her Authors Take Sides questionnaire in 1937, filing under Neutral.

— Hours Press (2020); Cunard, Nancy. Negro: Anthology 1931–1933, first edition (Nancy Cunard at Wishart and Co., 1934) — catalogue record

Who they drew from

Influence running inward — the writers and artists whose work fed theirs. Admiration is not acquaintance; these edges claim neither a meeting nor a friendship.

Illustrated portrait of Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont

Pound treated Gourmont as the model of a working intelligence in literature and spent a decade moving him into English. He wrote him into A Study in French Poets, gave him a chapter of his own — Remy de Gourmont: A Distinction — in Instigations (1920), and printed their correspondence there, including Gourmont's letter of June 1915 agreeing to help with a review linking Paris, London and New York. He translated Un cœur virginal as A Virgin Heart in 1921 and Physique de l'amour as The Natural Philosophy of Love in 1922. The postscript Pound attached to that translation is Pound's own argument and not Gourmont's.

— Ezra Pound, Instigations (1920); Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love — translated with a postscript by Ezra Pound (1922)

Who drew from them

Influence running outward — the writers and artists who built on their work.

Illustrated portrait of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

The man who taught him to distrust adjectives — the memoir's own accounting — and whose blue-pencil doctrine of cutting to the image runs under the whole Hemingway sentence.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Movements

The artistic and literary currents this life ran through.

Pen-and-ink illustration of four young writers revising manuscripts around a typewriter at a Paris café in the 1920s

Literary generation · c. 1921–1929

The Lost Generation

The movement's one-man infrastructure during his Paris years — editing, publishing, teaching the young to distrust adjectives, and founding Bel Esprit — before leaving for Rapallo in 1924.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928)

Start here

Cover of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Eighteen pages, written as he left London for Paris — the war elegy ('There died a myriad…') that shows exactly why the whole generation listened to him. The Cantos can wait; this can't.

Books by Ezra Pound

Cover of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Ezra Pound1920

Poetry

Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.

4.3
Cover of The Cantos by Ezra Pound

The Cantos

Ezra Pound1925

Poetry

The 'poem including history' — fifty years, 116 cantos, and modernism's most magnificent ruin.

4.0

Popular reading paths

Recommended starting order

Our editors' path for a first-time reader.

  1. 1.Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
  2. 2.The Cantos

Publication order

Watch the writer develop, book by book.

  1. 1.Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
  2. 2.The Cantos

Most popular first

Lead with the books readers loved most.

  1. 1.Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
  2. 2.The Cantos

Ezra Pound’s Places

The cataloged places connected to Ezra Pound — through the books, and through the documented record.

Places you can enter today appear first, followed by addresses to see from outside and sites that have vanished.

The doorway of 70 bis today in soft light, greenery visible through the open carriage entrance

Apartment · Notre-Dame-des-Champs / Montparnasse

Outside only

70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

Ezra Pound's Paris base — the courtyard studio where he built the furniture himself and ran the movement's business, a few doors from Hemingway's flat at No. 113.

Visit the place
The successor Shakespeare and Company bookshop today, green shopfront with browsers at the outdoor book bins

Bookshop · Odéon

Outside only

Shakespeare and Company (12 Rue de l'Odéon)

A lending-library member from January 1922 — Princeton's Shakespeare and Company Project preserves his membership and borrowing records.

Visit the place
The entrance of 27 rue de Fleurus today, cream stone façade and black ironwork gate

Salon · Notre-Dame-des-Champs / Luxembourg

Outside only

27 Rue de Fleurus

A guest at Stein's Saturday evenings — remembered in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as the visitor who broke the salon's little armchair.

Visit the place
Present-day color view of the pale stone frontage and numbered entrance at 20 rue Jacob

Salon · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Outside only

20 rue Jacob

Pound was among the writers Barney received at the Fridays during his Paris years, and Berthe Cleyrergue lists him among the guests she served. The sources name him without dating the visits.

Visit the place

From the journal

Recent coverage of Ezra Pound's world

All stories

Real history

The Real Paris Behind A Moveable Feast

The Lost Generation's Paris wasn't a mood — it was a specific set of rooms within walking distance of each other, and an exchange rate. Here is the real map under the memoir.

Adriana Pope · · 10 min read

Questions about Ezra Pound

Who was Ezra Pound?

An American poet, editor, and critic (1885–1972), one of the organizing forces of literary modernism. He edited, promoted, and connected many of its major writers as well as writing his own long poem, The Cantos.

What is Ezra Pound best known for?

As a poet, The Cantos, the long unfinished work he wrote across his life, and the early Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). As an editor, he shaped T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, championed James Joyce, and mentored the young Hemingway.

Did Ezra Pound live in Paris?

Yes, from 1921 to 1924. He kept a courtyard studio at 70 bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a few doors from Hemingway, and ran much of the modern movement's business from it before leaving for Rapallo, Italy, in 1924.

How did Pound influence Hemingway?

He drilled Hemingway in cutting every spare word — the blue-pencil discipline that runs under Hemingway's style. Hemingway repaid the lessons by teaching Pound to box.

Why is Ezra Pound controversial?

He spent the Second World War broadcasting from Mussolini's Italy against the Allied war effort, was arrested for treason in 1945, and spent twelve years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington before returning to Italy. The debate over the man continues; the debt modern poetry owes his editing is separate from it.

Sourced claims

Every connection the graph holds for Ezra, with the evidence behind it.

Lived at · 1921–1924

70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

Ezra Pound's Paris base — the courtyard studio where he built the furniture himself and ran the movement's business, a few doors from Hemingway's flat at No. 113.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964); Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Frequented · 1922–1924

Shakespeare and Company (12 Rue de l'Odéon)

A lending-library member from January 1922 — Princeton's Shakespeare and Company Project preserves his membership and borrowing records.

— Shakespeare and Company Project

Frequented · 1921–1924

27 Rue de Fleurus

A guest at Stein's Saturday evenings — remembered in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as the visitor who broke the salon's little armchair.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Mentored · 1922

Ernest Hemingway

Pound drilled the young Hemingway in cutting every spare word; Hemingway repaid the editing lessons by teaching Pound to box.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

Associated with · 1921–1924

The Lost Generation

The movement's one-man infrastructure during his Paris years — editing, publishing, teaching the young to distrust adjectives, and founding Bel Esprit — before leaving for Rapallo in 1924.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928)

Met · 1920

James Joyce

Pound championed Joyce for years by post — serializations, subsidies, publishers — before they finally met at Sirmione in 1920; it was Pound who pointed Joyce toward Paris weeks later.

— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959)

Influenced

Ernest Hemingway

The man who taught him to distrust adjectives — the memoir's own accounting — and whose blue-pencil doctrine of cutting to the image runs under the whole Hemingway sentence.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Collaborated with · 1922-01

T. S. Eliot

Eliot finished a draft of The Waste Land at Lausanne in late 1921 and stopped in Paris on the way home in January 1922, where he and Pound worked the poem into the shape it was published in. The printed dedication, il miglior fabbro, is Eliot's acknowledgement of the cutting.

— T. S. Eliot: the life, with timeline, Timeline, September 1921 and January 1922

Frequented

20 rue Jacob

Pound was among the writers Barney received at the Fridays during his Paris years, and Berthe Cleyrergue lists him among the guests she served. The sources name him without dating the visits.

— Natalie Clifford Barney — French Women & Feminists in History: A Resource Guide; Gregory Stephenson, Conversations with Berthe Cleyrergue, Housekeeper to the Legendary Amazon, Nathalie Clifford Barney (2014)

Met · 1922

Ernest Hemingway

Met within weeks of Hemingway's arrival in Paris; Pound edited him, promoted him, and took boxing lessons in exchange — the era's fairest trade. The memoir's portrait of Pound is the warmest Hemingway ever wrote of another writer.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), 'Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit'; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Met · 1909

D. H. Lawrence

They met in November 1909 through The English Review circle, at one of Violet Hunt's at-homes. Lawrence described the evening in a letter to Louie Burrows dated 20 November 1909. The two writers never became close.

— The English Review: An Introduction; John Worthen, Extended Biography of D. H. Lawrence

Met · 1914-09

T. S. Eliot

They met in London in September 1914, a month after Eliot reached England. Pound sent "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe's Poetry, which printed it the following June — Eliot's first appearance in a magazine of any standing.

— T. S. Eliot: the life, with timeline, Timeline, 1914 and 1915

Met · 1920

Natalie Clifford Barney

Pound was one of the writers Barney received at 20 rue Jacob during his Paris years, in a room she ran expressly to get American, British and French writers reading and translating one another. The start year is approximate: the Library of Congress guide names him among her regular guests without dating the introduction.

— Natalie Clifford Barney — French Women & Feminists in History: A Resource Guide

Influenced by · 1913

Remy de Gourmont

Pound treated Gourmont as the model of a working intelligence in literature and spent a decade moving him into English. He wrote him into A Study in French Poets, gave him a chapter of his own — Remy de Gourmont: A Distinction — in Instigations (1920), and printed their correspondence there, including Gourmont's letter of June 1915 agreeing to help with a review linking Paris, London and New York. He translated Un cœur virginal as A Virgin Heart in 1921 and Physique de l'amour as The Natural Philosophy of Love in 1922. The postscript Pound attached to that translation is Pound's own argument and not Gourmont's.

— Ezra Pound, Instigations (1920); Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love — translated with a postscript by Ezra Pound (1922)

Collaborated with · 1930–1934

Nancy Cunard

Cunard's Hours Press printed A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930, the first collected edition of Pound's first thirty cantos. He contributed to Negro: An Anthology four years later and answered her Authors Take Sides questionnaire in 1937, filing under Neutral.

— Hours Press (2020); Cunard, Nancy. Negro: Anthology 1931–1933, first edition (Nancy Cunard at Wishart and Co., 1934) — catalogue record

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