Introduction

Table of Important Dates, Events, and Anecdotes
(Most of his critical essays on literature, art, and music are omitted)

Pound the Poet

I. Residence in U.S.A. and Travels Abroad (23 years)

1885 Ezra Weston Loomis Pound born on October 30th in Hailey, Idaho, U.S.A. Certainly one of the most controversial literary figures of the 20th century, possessing an extraordinary gift for discovering geniuses and, according to T. S. Eliot, more responsible for the 20th-century revolution in poetry than any other individual as well as the"invention"of Chinese poetry for our time.
1901-5 Undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania where he was admitted as a special student (aged 15) in order to study "eight or nine" languages and to avoid "irrelevant subjects." He meets the then medical student, William Carlos Williams, and they begin poetic experiments together. After two years, he retransferred to Hamilton College where he received his Ph.B.
1904 First intimations of the Cantos.
1906 M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of Pennsylvania. Awarded a Harrison Fellowship in Romanics, and travels in Europe working on Lope de Vega.
1907 Appointed lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash college, Crawfordsville, Indiana. Dismissed after four months for being too European and unconventional as well as for befriending and entertaining a stranded burlesque artiste (he kept her in his room for one night).
1908 Travels via Gibraltar, Spain and southern France to Venice, where his first book of poems, A Lume Spento, is published at his own expense.

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II. Expatriate in England (12 years)

1908 Pound proclaims his contempt for America's "booby" culture and government and, the first of the modern American expatriates, goes to London, where he teaches Medieval Romance Literature for a time at the Regent Street Polytechnic. He challenged a critic of the London Times to a duel for holding "too high an opinion of Milton."
1909 Personae of Ezra Pound; Exultations of Ezra Pound. "Virginal." Meets the philosopher-poet, T. E. Hulme, later killed in the First World War; the famous novelist, Ford Madox Ford; W.B. Yeats with whom he lived for 3 years.
1911 Canzoni of Ezra Pound.
1912 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti; Ripostes. "Portrait d'une Femme." Pound becomes foreign poetry editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited by Harriet Monroe. School of Imagism defined in Ripostes, which contained the first so-called Imagist poems by T.E. Hulme, "H. D." (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell. At a later date, Lowell took over the movement because of certain poet's dissatisfaction with Pound's despotism.
1913 Pound serves as W. B. Yeats' secretary.
1914 Edits Des Imagistes: An Anthology. 'Vorticism' (the release of intellectual energy through art) published in the Fortnightly Review. Contributes to Wyndham Lewis' Blast (1914-15). Literary editor of the Egoist, in which James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published. In April, marries an English girl, Dorothy Shakespear. Meets T.S. Eliot.
1915 Works on Fenollosa's MSS, from which he publishes Cathay. Edits Catholic Anthology, which includes poems ("Prufrock"and "Portrait of a Lady") by T. S. Eliot, Begins work on The Cantos of Ezra Pound.
1916
Edits (from Ernest Fenollosa's notes) 'Noh'or Accomplishment and Certain Noble Plays of Japan. He used to sign his letters with a seal in the Chinese manner.
1917 First three Cantos published in Poetry, later withdrawn. Collaborates with Little Review, in which parts of James Joyce's Ulysses appear in installments.
1918 World War I ends.
1919 Completes Homage to Sextus Properties.

1920 		Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; Umbra; Instigations (including Ernest Fenollosa's essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.)

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III. Sojourn in France (15 years)

1920 Disillusioned with England, he takes up residence in Paris until 1924, where he becomes acquainted with Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, ("I play tennis with Hem two or three times a week," he wrote his father, Homer), and James Joyce. Several of these celebrities he aided with his criticism or helped to publish their controversial works.
1912
Poems 1918-1921, which includes Cantos IV-VII.

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IV. Settles in Italy (20 years)

1922 Correspondence with Eliot and 'editing' of The Waste Land. Essays on Ulysses.
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length. Paris wore even less well than London and so Pound departed for Mussolini's "reawakening" Italy; he settled permanently in the Mediterranean town of Rapallo near Genoa, where his daughter Mary was born.
1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra pound; Testament of Francois Villon, Pound's opera, for which he wrote the libretto and the music, performed in Paris. His next child, a girl, he named Omar Shakespear Pound; she was born in Paris on September 10th.
1927-8 Edits and publishes Exile.
1928 A Draft of cantos XVII-XXVIII; Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot; Ta Hio 〔大學〕, the Great Learning.
1929 Great Depression begins (ends c. 1935) and causes worldwide financial disaster and unemployment.
1930
A Draft of XXX Cantos; Imaginary Letters.
1931 How to Read. Lectures at the Universita Bocconi, Milan, on Jefferson and Van Buren.
1933 ABC of Economics. Edits Active Anthology.
1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI; ABC of Reading; Make it New (a title from the Confucian maxim日日新, which he had emblazoned on a scarf he frequently wore).
1937 The Fifth Decade of The Cantos [XLII-LI]; Polite Essays; Confucius Digest of the Analects.
1938 Revisits America for the first time since 1910 in hopes of averting the war, but World War II breaks out in the next year. Honorary D. Lit. conferred by Hamilton College, despite the fact that he had described American university presidents as "potbellied, toadying presidents of fat beaneries." The Intellectual Autobiography of a Poet (published in England under the title, Guide to Kulchur).
1940 Cantos LII-LXXI. Begins radio addresses on a wide variety of topics from Rome in support, he claims, of the U.S. constitution; others called some of them Fascist propaganda. He advised America to stay out of Europe, announcing that bankers and munitions interests were entirely to blame for the unsettled situation.
1941 In December, America declares war on the Axis powers and Pound temporarily discontinues his broadcasts.
1942 His father dies in Rapallo. He is refused permission to join a diplomatic train of Americans being evacuated from Italy to Lisbon and the U.S. Political broadcasts resumed in January, criticizing American intervention.
1943 In July, indicted in absentia for treason by a Grand Jury in Washington, D.C. on thirteen counts.
1945

In May, handed over by Italian partisans to U.S. Army authorities in Rapallo; formally arrested in Genoa, then sent to U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center (D. T. C.) near Pisa, where he is confined in a six by six and a half feet steel pen. The 60-year-old poet-prisoner characterized this period by saying: "Birds do not sing in cages." Later he was removed to a more humane but still crude makeshift shelter. His lawyer, Julien Cornell, describes this solitary confinement in a roofless barbed wire cage as follows:

It was now full summer, and the Italian sun beat down on the prison yard with unbearable intensity. A military highway ran nearby, and having no shelter he could not escape the ceaseless noise and dust. Although all the other prisoners were supplied with tents to keep out the heat and glare of the sun, Pound was given no such protection, probably so that guards could watch him at all times. Whereas other prisoners were let out of the cages for meals and exercise, Pound was always confined. While others were penned up in groups, he was alone in his cage. After enduring the tropical sun all day, neither sleep nor rest came with the night-electric lights glared into the poet's cage and burned into his blood-shot eyes. The cage was devoid of all furniture. Pound lay on the cement floor in his blankets, broiled by the sun and wet by the rain.

Works on his translation of Confucius After six weeks of this barbarous treatment he had a serious mental breakdown, characterized by claustrophobia and hysterical panic. First draft of The Pisan Cantos.

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V. Imprisoned in America (13 years)

1945 In November, flown to Washington, where he is reindicted for treason. Found mentally unfit to defend himself and, at age 60, he is committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Washington, D.C. He spent fifteen months in a large concrete dormitory without furniture or windows, in which every second occupant was confined in a sort of straitjacket.
1947 The Unwobbling Pivot〔中庸〕 and the Great Digest of Confucius 〔孟子〕(dated D.T.C., Pisa, 5 October-5 November 1945).
1948 The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV-LXXXIV); The Cantos of Ezra Pound, collected edition including The Pisan Cantos.
1950 The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (edited by D.D. Paige).
1951 The Confucian Analects 〔論語〕.
1952 Resumes work on the Cantos.
1953 The Translations of Ezra Pound (edited by Hugh Kenner).
1954 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (edited with an introduction by T. S. Eliot); The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius〔詩經〕.
1955 Section Rock Drill: 85-95 de los Cantares.
1956 Sophokles: Women of Trachis: A Version by Ezra Pound.

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VI. Return to Italy (14 years)

1958 In April, after almost 13 years of virtual imprisonment, released by the District Court of Washington, D.C., from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and all charges against him dropped largely through the intervention of Archibald Macleish, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot. When asked about Frost's efforts on his behalf, Pound replied, "He ain't been in much of a hurry." Return to Italy where he greeted reporters in Naples with a Fascist salute. "All America,"he announced, "is an insane asylum."
1959 Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares.
1960 Impact: Essays on the Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization (edited by Noel Stock).
1962 The Love Poem of Ancient Egypt. Trans. By Pound and Noel Stock.
1963 Plagued by long months of illness from a circulatory disease, he appeared introspective and unsure of himself. He claimed he had reached 'the age of doubt' and that perhaps his whole life had been wrong. "I have erred always . . . and spoiled whatever came in contact with me," he said in an interview. "I know now that I no longer know anything. I have become an illiterate literary man . . . I am unable to think. I am aware only of my disconcerting uncertainty."

1964		 Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry (edited by Pound and Marcella Spann). The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1-109).
1965 In January, attends the funeral service of T. S. Eliot in Westminster Cathedral and visits the widow of W. B. Yeats in Dublin.
1967 Edits with an introduction Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound.
1969 Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX to CXVII (including some fragments for insertion in earlier Cantos). These were all apparently written before 1962. In June, returns to U.S. on brief private visit. Attends graduation ceremonies at Hamilton College.
1970 Pound became increasingly silent and unsociable in the last years of his life, possibly applying to himself what he said of E. E. Cummings in 1937: "a bloke who keeps silent until he has something to say."
1972 A kind of "lost leader," he died at the age of 87 in Venice on November 3rd.

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