Pound completed a B.A. in philosophy from Hamilton College; he then taught romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an M.A. in Spanish. After a year on the faculty of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1905, he was fired for befriending a transsexual. Fleeing provincialism and artistic sterility, he toured southern Europe and researched a doctoral thesis on the plays of Lope de Vega. He earned what he could from reviewing and tutoring and worked as secretary for poet William Butler Yeats while championing "imagism," his term for modern poetry.
In 1908, Pound published his first volumes, A Lume Spento [With Tapers Quenched], A Quinzaine for This Yule, and Personae [Masks]. Content to live outside his native land, in September 1909, he settled in a sparse front room in London's Kensington section; five years later, he married Dorothy Shakespear. Under the influence of James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford, Pound rapidly produced Exultations in 1909 and Provença the following year. He covered new ground as poet-as-translator with The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), which he set to music for opera, and the verse of French troubadour François Villon. Pound's translation of Li Po's poems in Cathay (1915) and Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) anticipated a demand for Asian literature. A greater predictor of change was "In a Station of the Metro" (1916), Pound's nineteen-syllable haiku that captures with impressionistic clarity the direction in which the poet intended his art to go.
Pound achieved his most influential imagism in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920), a collection of incisive poetic snapshots. During the post–World War I spiritual malaise, he joined Paris café society, a clamorous coterie known as the "lost generation." In search of quiet, in 1922, he dropped his literary friends and migrated to Rapallo, Italy, his home for twenty years. He pored over medieval manuscripts and became Paris correspondent for The Dial, which conferred a $2,000 prize on him in 1928. A mark of his achievement in language was publication of Translations of Ezra Pound (1933) and the political critiques in ABC of Economics (1933) and Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935).
