Ezra Pound关于庞德生平及作品的简介.doc

A “Mad” Poet with High Literary Talents Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885-1972), a leading spokesman of the Imagist Movement, was one of the most important poets in his time. He exerted a profound influence on the generation of the British and American writers who launched modern literature after the First World War, and decisively affected the course of the twentieth-century American literature. Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyces Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1925: He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. During the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming usury and international capitalism for the war. He moved to Italy in 1924 where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends dismay, he embraced Benito Mussolinis fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. As a result of which he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy in 1945 and later he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years. He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958, thanks to a protracted campaign by his fellow writers, and returned to live in Italy until his death. While in custody in Italy he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Boll