Word: pound
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ezra Pound was a contradictory civilization of one. He was the most original American poet since Walt Whitman, a magically imaginative translator, and a literary promoter nonpareil. He also produced more verbal trash than any other great writer of modern times, wasted decades advancing crackpot schemes for monetary reform, railed disgracefully at "kikes, sheenies and the oily people," called Hitler "a saint" and democracy a "swindle," betrayed his country during World War II, and in old age spiraled down through hells of paranoia...
Biographers tend to get lost in the labyrinth of Pound's poetry, politics and character. But in Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, Biographer C. David Heymann has attacked the problems with a special advantage. Under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, he was the first scholar to study the massive FBI files on the Ezra Pound treason case. The result is the most harshly realistic portrait of the poet so far produced, a sickening, touching study of a man of great gifts gone wrong...
Born in Hailey, Idaho, Oct. 30, 1885, Pound was a prodigy who at 15 entered the University of Pennsylvania "resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living." After he was fired from an instructor's job at Wabash College when a prostitute was found in his rooms, Pound showed up in London at 23 wearing a piratical red beard, green felt trousers, pink jacket, hand-painted Japanese tie, huge sombrero, one turquoise earring, and pince...
...dazzling volume of verse called Personae (Masks) abruptly forced serious consideration of the upstart's mission: to drag poetry out of the 19th century and into the 20th. Poetry, Pound insisted, must have the virtues of good prose. "No book words, no straddled adjectives ('addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness . . . nothing you couldn't. in the stress of some emotion, actually...
...helped persuade the poet to adopt the direct, plain manner of his last and greatest period. Ezra raised money to support T.S. Eliot and, in the most celebrated editing feat of the century, transformed The Waste Land from a fascinating mess into a masterpiece. James Joyce admitted that without Pound's wheeling and dealing to put bread on his table, he could never have written Ulysses...