3627编号美国文学2
His birth in 1885,Ezra Pound was born in Haley, Idaho but spent his formative years in Wyancote, Pennsylvania, where his father was an assayer to the United States Mint.,His education in 1905,He studied at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to Hamilton college, receiving a degree. Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he graduated from university, he had mastered 9 languages as well as English grammar and literature.,一 EZRA POUND,in 1908,Spain, Venice,London,he refined his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the anthology Des Imagistes (1914).,Ezra Pound founded the Imagist movement in poetry, which encouraged experimenting with different verse forms, and opposed representational art in favor of abstract forms. Pound championed the likes of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce and, influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry, advocated free meter and a more economical use of words and images in poetic expression, leading the Imagist Movement of poetry.,in 1914,Ezra married the artist Dorothy Shakespear,in 1922,He began a life-long relationship with violinist Olga Rudge.,in 1920,He moved to Paris,in 1924 He got acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends (which included Ernest Hemingway), then settled in Italy.,In 1946,He was acquitted, deemed unfit for trial, and declared insane.,He was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. After many letters and appeals from friends and writers, including Robert Frost, Hemingway . Ezra won his release from the hospital in 1958. He soon returned to Venice, where he died, a recluse, in 1972.,His Recluse Life and Death,二The summarize of Pounds works,-He give his life to his works.,The main works,Personae,Ripostes,Cathay,The lake Isle,Lustra,Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,Indiscretions,Digest of Analects,The cantos,Mauberly, in tautly rhymed satirical stanzas, depicts the war as the Geterdammerung of an emasculated and philistine culture, condemned by the limitation of its own horizons.,Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919),Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921),The free-verse Homage, an ironic persona poem based on the lyrics of the first-century Roman poet, is a defence of the private and erotic in poetry against the imperialistic jingoism promoted by war.,As The Cantos shows, he was now preoccupied with economics. The war, as he saw it, had been caused by the rivalries of international capitalists. He thought he had found a solution to the evils of unchecked capitalism, one especially favourable to the arts, in the Social Credit theory of Major C. H. Douglas, who argued that a system of state credit could increase purchasing power in the population at large, thus promoting creativity and removing power from bankers and financiers. Attracted to Mussolini by his energy and his promises of monetary reform, Pound namely assumed that the Italian leader could be persuaded to put Douglass theory into practice. At first, the main target of Pounds attacks is usury, which he depicts (e.g. in Canto 45) as an unnatural force that pollutes the creative instinct in humanity. By about 1930 the usurers he condemns are usually Jews, and his language is vitiated by virulent anti-Semitism.,The Cantos,A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) presents the poet as wandering Odysseus, travelling among the dead. Through juxtaposition, he uncovers repeated patterns in history and experiences moments when the world of time is transfigured by the eternal world of the gods. The mainly Mediterranean emphasis of the first thirty Cantos then gives way (in Cantos 31-70, published 1934-40) to the economic policies of early US presidents and the governance of ancient China. Despite an increase in prosy didacticism and much consequent turgidity, these sections contain some of Pounds finest poetry,His imprisonment brought about an artistic recovery. The Pisan Cantos (1948), drafted in the DTC, are the most directly personal poems he wrote. In adversity, and conscious of the tragedy of Europe, he contemplates his own past in that context, especially the water-shed years of the modern movement. Suffering and retrospection induce a new humility, exemplified in his care for the life around him-the insects, the animals, the camp guards. In St. Elizabeths he completed two rather more cryptic sections of the poem-Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959)-as well as a programe of translations from the Confucian classics.,Pounds style was clear, economical and concrete. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, he once said. As an essayist Pound wrote mostly about poetry. From the mid-1920s he examined the ways economic systems promote or debase culture. Why the hell dont the schools give a little rudimentary education in economics, the history of economics, and in the use of language, he wrote in 1933 in a letter to the Idaho senator William Borah, trying to recruit him in the mainly one-sided correspondence as an advoc