Chapter 2 - Context

Summary

Have you met Ezra Pound? … The Americans, young literary men, whom I know found him surly, supercilious and grumpy. I liked him myself very much.

John B. Yeats to his son, W. B. Yeats, 1910

When Ezra Pound arrived in London he was greeted as an American cowboy, a brash outsider offering poetry Punch satirized as blending “the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy” (in EPM 174). Outspoken, oddly dressed – he would occasionally wear a sombrero for a 1909 lecture series – Pound was, nonetheless, self-assured. His appearance was operatic and poetic at the same time, preferring flowing capes and open-necked shirts, but his speech was “Amerukun,” filled with idioms and neologisms unheard of in London. As one observer wrote, with “his rimless pince nez, his Philadelphian accent and his startling costume, part of which was a single turquoise earring, [he] contrived to look ‘every inch a poet.’” But his unorthodox ideas and direct approach to art made him more than an image as he challenged the stodginess of late Victorian culture and the indulgencies of the Decadents as he set out a modernist map that T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Lewis and others would follow.

An afternoon visit to the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in Sussex on 18 January 1914 illustrates how Pound first straddled and then rattled the age, causing Yeats to remark that “Pound has a desire personally to insult the world.”