Books

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on Oct. 30, 1885, and died in Venice on Nov. 1, 1972. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at 15, left for Europe in 1908, and eventually moved to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, in 1924.

During the 1930s, he became a supporter of Benito Mussolini. During World War II, he made eccentric broadcasts sent to America by Rome Radio. Many of the broadcasts and some of his Italian journalism at that time were viciously anti-Semitic. Although Pound had no knowledge of the Holocaust until after the war, his speeches and articles contributed to a climate of opinion that helped make that horror possible.

Pound was indicted for a new capital crime, radio treason, in 1943, and he was taken into custody by the U.S. Army in 1945. He was tried in Washington, found insane and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained until the United States quashed his indictment in 1958. In the last decade of his life, he lapsed into a serious depression and seldom spoke. He is buried in Venice.

Why write a book about a man who was anti-Semitic, indicted for treason and found insane? Put most directly, Pound was the greatest poet of the 20th century. His poems and translations have recently appeared in a volume from the Library of America, and his monumental Cantos, written over nearly 50 years, are published by New Directions.

Aside from his achievements as a poet and translator, Pound's criticism and correspondence had a vast influence. Collected in a uniform edition, it would fill 100 volumes. He discovered or recognized or got into print Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marianne Moore and Ernest Hemingway, just to mention a few names.

It has been 20 years since the last full-scale biography of Pound appeared, and A. David Moody's splendidly researched and well-written book is greatly needed. As his title indicates, it is a critical biography, one that focuses on the poetry of Pound. Mr. Moody provides exhaustive commentary on Pound's poetic achievement, and he does so with discernment and taste.

As the author of an earlier, acclaimed volume, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, Mr. Moody must now be considered among the best readers of modernist poetry.

His choice to focus on the poetry means that a firm sense of the historical milieu is sometimes lacking – he's very good on the London years but the reader gets almost no sense of Pound's first 22 years as an American during a period of tremendous national debate about populism and the gold standard that heavily influenced his later thinking on economics and politics.

Those issues, in the end, are not important. "An epic is a poem including history," Pound wrote. As a poetic form, epics have great durability. In 700 years, Mussolini will be a footnote to The Cantos. If you wish to understand why Pound is so important, Mr. Moody is the indispensable guide.

Tim Redman, professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and president of PEN Texas, is the author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. He is working on a cultural biography of Pound.

A Portrait of the Man & His Work

Volume I: The Young Genius

1885-1920

A. David Moody

(Oxford University Press, $47.95)

ARCHIVES: Search for more stories on this and other topics | Search Tips

SUBSCRIBE: Get The Dallas Morning News delivered to your home