Old Poetry Old Poetry Poetry • Poets • Essays • Forums •

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

Search my poetry:
1 - 10 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, 10 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
  • A Pact
    I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
    I have detested you long enough.
    9 lines, 2 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
  • A Virginal
    No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
    I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
    14 lines
  • The Needle
    Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.
    Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
    15 lines
  • 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
  • Ballad For Gloom
    For God, our God is a gallant foe 
    That playeth behind the veil. 
    27 lines, 1 comment
  • Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord
    O fan of white silk,
    clear as frost on the grass-blade,
    3 lines, 1 comment
1 - 10 of 253  Show all by written, popularity, title, first line

Start a forum topic about this poet

, Content