Ezra Pound

An American poet and critic (1885 to 1972), born Ezra Weston Loomis Pound in Hailey, Idaho, and a major figure of early modernist poetry. In London around 1912 he organized and named the Imagist movement, urging a poetry built on precise, concrete images rather than ornamental abstraction, and went on to write Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the long poem sequence The Cantos (circa 1915 to 1962). During the Second World War he recorded paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the Fascist Italian government; after the war the United States indicted him for treason, and, ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, he was confined for over twelve years at St. Elizabeths Hospital before returning to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1972.