II.

Early Life

Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. When he was still an infant, his family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania. By age 15, Pound had decided to become a poet, resolving that by the age of 30 he “would know more about poetry than any man living.” In 1901 he entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended the future poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle. After two years he transferred to Hamilton College in New York State, and he graduated in 1905. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies in Romance languages, earning his M.A. degree. Pound then taught languages for a brief time at Wabash College in Indiana.

Deciding that there was no place in the United States for poets, Pound moved to Europe, living first in Venice, Italy. There he published his first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (1908; translated, 1965). Convinced that London was “the place for poetry,” he relocated there and worked as the secretary of Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

During his time in London, Pound supported himself by writing and teaching. He also served as the London representative for two American literary journals, the Chicago-based Poetry magazine and the New York City-based The Little Review. On the lookout for writers who seemed dedicated to reinvigorating literature of the period—or in his words, “making it new”—he regularly sent some of the era’s finest poems to be published in Poetry, notably T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). Pound also edited early drafts of Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922).