Ezra Pound关于庞德生平及作品的简介

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 Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's 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 Mussolini's 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 Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress. The honor triggered enormous controversy, mostly because of his anti-semitism, and in part because it raised literary questions about whether a supposedly "mad" poet who held such contentious views could produce work of any value. His political views ensure that his work remains controversial; in 1933 Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children."

Despite the fact that he was politically controversial and notorious for what he did in the wartime, Pound's literary talents are extraordinary. He composed poems, wrote criticisms and did translations. His commitment to poetry was total: to poetry as a craft, as a moral and spiritual resource and eventually as a means of salvaging culture, redeeming history. Pound's poetic works include twelve volumes of verse which were later collected and published in Collect- ed Early Poems of Ezra Pound(1982), and Personae(1909), and some longer pieces such as Hugh Selwya Mauberley (1920) and his life's work, the one hundred and sixteen Cantos that he published between 1916 and 1969.

The Imagist Movement

Pound's artistic talents are on full display in the history of the Imagist Movement, which flourished from 1909 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and American writers and poets. This is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson's wordiness and high-flown language in poetry. As one of the leaders of the Imagists, Pound endorsed the group's three main principles, which include direct

treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome. "The point of Imagism," Pound wrote in 1914, "is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.‖ Obviously the primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. Pound's famous one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro" would serve as a typical example of the Imagist ideas.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd；

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station. This little poem looks to be a modern adoption of the Japanese haiku. Pound wrote an account of its composition, however, which claims that the poem's form was determined by the experience that inspired it, evolving organically rather than being chosen arbitrarily. Whether truth or myth, the

piece has become a famous document in the history of Imagism.

The Cantos

Pound's earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century Romanticism: songs in praise of a lady, songs concerning the poet's craft, love and friendship, death, the transience of beauty and the permanence of art, and some other subjects that Pound could call his own: the pain of exile, metamorphosis, the delightful psychic experience, the ecstatic moment, etc. Later he is more concerned about the problems of the modem culture: the contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of cultural renewal as well. Take his epic poem, The Cantos, for example. Pound traces the rise and fall of eastern and western empires, the moral and social chaos of the modern world, especially the corruption of America after the heroic time of Jefferson. Hemingway wrote, "The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature." From the perception of these things, stems the poet's search for order, which involves a search for the principles on which the poet's craft is based.

The bulk of Pound's work on The Cantos began after his move to

Italy. Like all the other great epics, it is the story of good and evil, a descent into hell and progress to paradise. Its hundreds of characters fall into three groups: those who enjoy hell and stay there; those who experience a metamorphosis and want to leave; and a few who lead the rest to paradiso terrestre. He began work on it in 1915, but there were several false starts and he abandoned most of his earlier drafts, beginning again in 1922.The subject matter ranges from Odysseus, Troy, Dionysus, Malatesta, Confucius, and Napoleon, to Jefferson and Mussolini, Chinese history, Pisa, and usury, relying on memories, diaries, jokes, hymns, anecdotes, ideogrammic translation, and up to 15 different languages.

The Other Two Writers

Robert Lee Frost (1874 –1963) was an American poet who is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry and occasional screenplays. The majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi. Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.