Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Family background

Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948),[4] who married in 1884.[5] Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the United States General Land Office.[4][6] Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.[7]

Both sides of Pound's family emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650.[5] Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis,[8] married Thaddeus Coleman Pound.[7] On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the first Connecticut constitution.[9] The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's maternal grandparents.[5] After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother.[10]

Early education

Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old.[11] Her husband followed and found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote.[5] Pound's education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893.[5] Known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894.[12] His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election.[b]

In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot.[14] The following year he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.[15] He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.[16][c]

University

In 1901, at 15 years old, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.[18] Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy.[19] His one distinction in first year was in geometry,[20] but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature.[21] In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects".[22][d] He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.[24]

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades.[25] Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake.[26] Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits.[25] He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer.[27]

After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the name "H.D."). She was then a student at Bryn Mawr College, and he hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book.[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist.[30] After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906.[31] His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book News Monthly that September.[32] He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.[33] In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed.[34] Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.[35]

Teaching

I am homesick after mine own kind, Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces, But I am homesick after mine own kind.

— Personae of Ezra Pound (1909)[36]written in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 1907[37]

From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College,[38] a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana,[39] which he called "the sixth circle of hell".[40] One former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent".[41]

He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president's office.[42] He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room.[43] Shocked at having been expelled,[44] he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on the RMS Slavonia.[45]