A technical genius and pivotal figure in world poetry, Ezra Loomis Pound was the iconoclast of his day. A restless seeker and experimenter, he disdained his American roots, kept a ménage à trois with his wife and a mistress, and cultivated a bohemian image by dressing in scruffy, romantic splendor — cane, billowing cape, and tunic topped by rumpled hair and a saucy Van Dyke beard. On Paris's fabled Left Bank, he kept company with expatriates Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein and counseled emerging writers of such stature and promise as Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, H. D., e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Amy Lowell. In addition to producing a formidable canon of verse, essay, criticism, biography, and translation, Pound stirred international controversy and led a re-evaluation of language and meaning in modern verse.
Pound was born in a cabin in the frontier town of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. He lived for a year in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and came of age in Wyncote outside Philadelphia, where his father was an assistant assayer for the U.S. Mint. Pound's public schooling ended with enrollment at Cheltenham Military Academy. After entering the University of Pennsylvania at age 15, he knew that his life would consist of mastering all there was to know about poetry. He focused on Latin, Medieval, and Renaissance studies and formed a close friendship with fellow student William Carlos Williams, who lived for a time with the Pound family.
