Word: pound
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...dazzling volume of verse called Personae (Masks) abruptly forced serious consideration of the upstart's mission: to drag poetry out of the 19th century and into the 20th. Poetry, Pound insisted, must have the virtues of good prose. "No book words, no straddled adjectives ('addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness . . . nothing you couldn't. in the stress of some emotion, actually...
...helped persuade the poet to adopt the direct, plain manner of his last and greatest period. Ezra raised money to support T.S. Eliot and, in the most celebrated editing feat of the century, transformed The Waste Land from a fascinating mess into a masterpiece. James Joyce admitted that without Pound's wheeling and dealing to put bread on his table, he could never have written Ulysses...
Floating Euphoria. Pound, meanwhile, brought out a volume of his own verse every year, worked steadily at his massive intercultural epic The Cantos, and cranked out three or four critical articles a week. His cash return was painfully small-often less than ? 50 (about $250) a year. By 1916, Pound had begun to question the values of a "botched civilization" that starved its artists and trampled the flower of its youth in a war he considered meaningless. In a blinding revelation it came to him that usury, the practice of charging money for the use of money, was the cause...
From a cottage in Rapallo, Italy, Pound promoted his monetary and racist ideas as energetically as he had promoted poetry. When Mussolini granted him an audience, he was utterly taken in. "There is too much future," he wrote in a floating euphoria, "and only me and Muss to attend...
...April 1939, Pound set off on a "mercy mission" to the U.S. to bring "Franklin Finkelstein Roosevelt" to his senses. When the President refused to see him, he returned to Italy in disgust and began to air his half-baked ideas and bigotry over Radio Rome. Between January 1941 and September 1943, he made 125 broadcasts...