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Ezra Pound

Hemingway wrote in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he

gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He writes articles about them. He

introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them

when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

Ivan Georgiana

Romn-Englez

An II,Grupa A

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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. Thebook should be a ball of light in one 's hand.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic and a

major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became known for his role in

developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian poets, favored tightlanguage, unadorned imagery, and a strong correspondence between the verbal and musical

qualities of the verse and the mood it expressed. His best-known works includeRipostes (1912),

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos, which

consumed his middle and late career, and was published between 1917 and 1969.

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary

magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James

Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make hundreds of radio

broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in particular Jews, broadcasts thatwere monitored by the U.S. government, as a result of which he was arrested for treason by American

forces in Italy in 1945. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days ina six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and

the waters went over me." Deemed unfit to stand trial, a decision disputed for decades after his death, he

was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

While in custody in Italy he had begun work on sections ofThe Cantos that became known asThe Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library ofCongress. His political views ensure that his work remains controversial; in 1933 Time magazine calledhim "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children." Hemingway

nevertheless wrote, "The best of Pound's writingand it is in the Cantoswill last as long as there is any

literature.

He also had a job as a teacher of Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville,

Indiana, a conservative town that he called the sixth circle of hell, with an equally conservative college

from which he was dismissed after deliberately provoking the college authorities. Smoking wasforbidden, so he would smoke cigarillos in his office down the corridor from the President's. He annoyed

his landlords by entertaining friends, including women, and was forced to move from one house after

"[t]wo stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with a lady gent impersonator in my privut

apartments," as he told a friend. He was eventually caught in flagrante, although the details remain

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unclear and he denied any wrongdoing. The incident involved a stranded chorus girl to whom he offered

tea and his bed for the night when she was caught in a snowstorm; when she was discovered the next

morning by the landladies, Misses Ida and Belle Hall, his insistence that he had slept on the floor was met

with disbelief, and he was asked to leave the college. He was glad to be free of the place.

He wrote poetry ,but also prose,some of the most known pieces of art are:A girl,A

pact,The River Merchant's Wife,Medallion,Pisan Cantos, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony

(1924),Digest of the Analects (1937),Gaudier Brzeska (1916),Guide to Kulchur(1938),How To

Read(1931),Imaginary Letters (1930) etc.

A girl

The tree has entered my hands,The sap has ascended my arms,

The tree has grown in my breast-

Downward,The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,

Moss you are,You are violets with wind above them.

A child - so high - you are,

And all this is folly to the world.

I believe that this poem is based on the mith of Apollo and Daphne. Pound is telling in

this poem the part in which Daphne is turning into a laurel tree to scape from Apollo. The first part is told by

Daphne in first person, telling her process of transformation. The second part is told by Apollo who is seeing

the process.This poem elaborates Ezra's view on history and culture in the context of a

young woman. The world of dry dead energyless civilisation is contrasted against the natural pagan world,symbolised by the girl.

In ancient Rome there are many examples of women turning into plants and animals in their fiction

such as Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this context of the ancient world this happens in the presence of a God

desiring the woman.In "Metamorphoses," The Roman poet Ovid told the story of Daphne, daughter of a river

god. She was beautiful but shunned all suitors. One day Apollo, the sun god, saw her when she was hunting inthe woods. He followed her but she was a fast runner, and fled.

He called and called but she wouldn't stop, and for a long time he couldn't catch her; nymphs like

Daphne knew it was too risky to have a god for a lover. As she approached the river she felt his breath on her

neck, called out to her father for help, and immediately she began changing into alaurel tree. Apollo watched the change with dismay and grief. Pound seems to add a hint of self-disgust in ther

too: "And all this is folly to the world" ,but still she's beautiful, even as a plant.

Although we can make this comparation with the mith of Apollo and Daphne the interpretation can

be made in several ways,because if we think at the fact that the tree is considered to be the symbol of life,wecan assume that he can also talk about his daughter.The tree has entered my hands can symbolize the first

time he hold his daughter,a new life compared to the tree.The supreme love expressed by saying that she is s

high. It can also mean how the girl is growing, first she is as tall as the hand, then the shoulder and finally the

breast. Each time she is growing farther from the mother that gave birth to her.

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A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -

I have detested you long enough.I come to you as a grown child

Who has had a pig-headed father;I am old enough now to make friends.

It was you that broke the new wood,

Now is a time for carving.We have one sap and one root -

Let there be commerce between us.

The name of the poem is very simple and suggestive ,because we can understand from the title the

content of the poem and we can make an assimilation with the pacts we,as readers,have made in ower lives.

Pound begins the poem with straight-forward lines expressing his long-lived aversion to Whitman. "...I have

detested you long enough". The reader can assume that Pound has never warmed up to Whitman's work

previously, and is perhaps experiencing a change of heart. However, the first line of the poem implies that the

pact being made is two-sided, involving both Pound and Whitman physically.

"The Pact," published in 1916, seems to be a nearly back-handed tribute to the late great in the eyes of

Pound, who might almost feel dwarfed by Whitman in terms of talent. The lines that follow further this theory

Pound calls himself a "grown child," sheepishly admitting his hatred for the man while hardly praising him. H

continues the insult, calling Whitman his "pig-headed father," which tells the reader that, in a way, Pound feel

intimidating by Whitman so much as to compare him to a father figure, or perhaps the father of poetry. He is a

mere child, rash in his hatred, teeming with contempt, slowing warming up to the man he has for so long

denounced.Continuing with line five, Pound begins to credit Whitman for paving the way for him. He "tells"

him that he is ready to let go and move out on his own; he is "old enough to make friends" and can manage for

himself. This symbolizes his freedom from the dead poets - the late greats - who have daunted him in his earli

years. Whitman has "broke(n) the new wood," but it is Pound who must now create masterpieces and greatliterary works from what has been provided). In the conclusion, Pound connects himself to Whitman, sealing

the "pact" and settling his emotions for the poet. He uses the word "commerce" to evoke the idea of exchange

for goods, implying that writing is based on inspiration, and Whitman is loaning Pound some of his.

As Walt Whitman had been deceased for some time when "The Pact" was written, Ezra Pound lends to

signify his relationship with all of the dead poets, denouncing and praising their life-time accomplishments.

Though it is unclear, Pound seems to be suffering from a sort of jealousy complex, feeling competitive with

dead men who lap him generationally.

The critic Macha Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant

rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant vitality were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound.Ezra

Pound died at the Civil Hospital of Venice, in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, aged87, with Olga(his mistress) at his side.

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