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Ezra Pound

I lived from 1885-1972. I was from the USA, and am in the Americas category.

I influenced poets John Berryman, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, Sterling A Brown, Archibald MacLeish, Harriet Monroe, A.K. Ramanujan, Robert Duncan, Wallace Stevens.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

Popular poetry

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1 - 30 of 253  Show all by written, popularity, title, first line
  • A Girl
    The tree has entered my hands,
    The sap has ascended my arms,
    10 lines, 11 comments
  • A Pact
    I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
    I have detested you long enough.
    9 lines, 2 comments
  • In A Station Of The Metro
    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
    petals on a wet, black bough.
    1 lines, 4 comments
  • And The Days Are Not Full Enough
    And the days are not full enough
    And the nights are not full enough
    3 lines, 4 comments
  • Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord
    O fan of white silk,
    clear as frost on the grass-blade,
    3 lines, 1 comment
  • Ballad Of The Goodly Fere
    Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all
    For the priests and the gallows tree?
    66 lines
  • Ione, Dead the Long Year
    Empty are the ways,
    Empty are the ways of this land
    8 lines, 2 comments
  • A Virginal
    No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
    I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
    14 lines
  • Ballad For Gloom
    For God, our God is a gallant foe 
    That playeth behind the veil. 
    27 lines, 1 comment
  • The Needle
    Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.
    Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
    15 lines
  • Sestina: Altaforte
    Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
    You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
    57 lines
  • An Immorality
    Sing we for love and idleness,
    Naught else is worth the having.
    8 lines
  • Song in the Manner of Housman
    O woe, woe,
    People are born and die,
    15 lines, 3 comments
  • The Bath-Tub
    As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
    When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
    4 lines
  • Nicotine
    Hymn to the Dope
    40 lines, 1 comment
  • Alba
    As cool as the pale wet leaves
          of lily-of-the-valley
    3 lines, 1 comment
  • The Tree
    I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
    Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
    12 lines
  • Ancient Music (Parody)
    Winter is icummen in,
    Lhude sing Goddamm.
    15 lines
  • Masks
    These tales of old disguisings, are they not
    Strange myths of souls that found themselves among
    14 lines
  • Before Sleep
    The lateral vibrations caress me,
    They leap and caress me,
    21 lines, 1 comment
  • Song
    Love thou thy dream
    All base love scorning,
    6 lines
  • The Encounter
    All the while they were talking the new morality
    Her eyes explored me.
    5 lines, 1 comment
  • Villonaud for This Yule
    Towards the Noel that morte saison
    (Christ make the shepherds' homage dear!)
    28 lines
  • Portrait d'une Femme
    Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
    London has swept about you this score years
    30 lines
  • The Garden
    En robe de parade. Samain
    Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
    14 lines
  • In Tempore Senectutis
    When I am old
    I will not have you look apart
    25 lines
  • Salutation
    O generation of the thoroughly smug
          and thoroughly uncomfortable,
    10 lines
  • Grace Before Song
    Lord God of heaven that with mercy dight
    Th'alternate prayer wheel of the night and light
    10 lines
  • The River-Merchant's Wife
    While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
    I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
    29 lines, 1 comment
  • The Lake Isle
    O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
    Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
    17 lines
1 - 30 of 253  Show all by written, popularity, title, first line

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