Ezra Pound Research Paper

Ezra Pound: the Quintessential Modernist The Modernist era evolved with the realization that conventional style, verse, language, and ideas could no longer express truth in the years following the turn of the twentieth century. Modernism sought to overturn traditional methods of writing and thinking in search of more honest and self-aware means of conveying truth in a rapidly changing world. The rejection of traditional form and “rules” of writing in favor of experimentation marked the period. Ezra Pound, one of the writers most intrinsic to the movement, coined the mantra Modernists strove to live by: “make it new.” Pound fathered two major subsets of Modernism: Imagism and Vorticism. Through these he stressed the need for clarity, directness, and a turn away from the sentimentality and flowery

Pound blamed capitalism for causing World War I and in 1939, after trying to convince the United States government to stay out of World War II, began to write anti-semitic material for Italian newspapers under Benito Mussolini. Pound soon began a furious letter-writing campaign, wrote for and was interviewed by several Axis Power newspapers, and did a series of over a hundred radio broadcasts over Rome Radio criticising the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Jewish people. The broadcasts were monitored by the United States, and in 1943 he was indicted in absentia for treason. In 1945 the United States arrested Pound. He was detained at a U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa where he was confined in isolation in a “death cell” outdoors for three weeks. After being diagnosed with the symptoms of a mental breakdown Pound was allowed better living conditions and reading material, and wrote the Pisan Cantos, a section of the much larger epic work, The Cantos, that he began writing in