Ezra Pound

Haters Gonna Hate

“He makes even less sense than me, only he doesn't even have a sense of humour. Meldundleize I don't liek hyphens Mrkgnao lulz”

~ James Joyce on Ezra Pound

“When the English language is long dead and historians have the benefit of objectivity, they will surely see Ezra Pound as having finally exceeded the brilliance of Shakespeare.”

~ Ezra Pound on Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (February 7, 1884 - June 9, 1969) was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure of the early modernist movement. His name is frequently rattled off by people who claim to enjoy poetry, and they prominently display his books as decorations on their bookshelves, which they call their personal libraries for some unknown reason.

He was also kind of a dick. It is reasonable to assume based on the obscurity of his poetry, his use of poetry to converse with dead people, and his confident support of the fascist movement in Italy that he was an ordinary privileged white person suffering from an unfortunate looseness of tongue a crazy crazy crazyperson.

Above all, Pound's greatest contribution to civilization was serving as the best possible answer to the question, "What would have happened if those mean Viennese academics had just let Hitler be an artist?"

An Unfunny Childhood

From the moment Pound was born on February 7th, 1884 in Terrified Alienation, Ohio, his doctor noticed that he had an exceptionally large capacity for holding information in the very shiny silver spoon in his right hand. Other than that, his childhood is shrouded in mystery. He later claimed that by the age of five, he had read all of Aristotle, Henry James, and Stephen King despite the fact that Stephen King had not been born yet. In an essay he published years later, "On Goodnight Moon", he ruthlessly attacks children's literature for its artless simple-mindedness:

There surely can be no pleasure from reading such drivel, I am sure of it. For in life we read so many books that are unnecessary and impart upon us next to nothing. I say that we must purge all of it, and instead feed the growing intellect of the child with Sophocles and Pirandello. Man, if I wasn't me I'd wanna fuck me.

Poetry

Cockblocked into destitution and corrupted by methamphetamines in college, Pound was sure there was no hope for him until he met his muse in a fellow student named HD ("Hot Dog"). Together with his new lover he published his first book of poetry, Hot Dog Water. He moved to the Europe with HD in the hopes of finding someone who didn't want to punch him two minutes into conversation.

After many years of sucking W. B. Yeats's cock (it's a little known fact Yeats was a famed chickenfarmer before he became a poet), Pound became a reasonably well known cereal box author. While in Europe, Pound published three volumes of poetry: PB & J: An Amalgamation, Il Canzone di Kool Aid Guy, and Confusing Allusions That Don't Make Sense. He was also noted for publishing "The Imagist Manifesto," which would go down in history for its important statements, such as:

To compose in the manner of the musical phrase, for the kike has no rhythm, and the metronome is a kikish conspiracy against the great white race. You may not know this, but the Greeks and the Romans used vowel length to determine their meters, but the kike, tonedeaf as he was, destroyed the great poetry of ancient times, perverted our holy languages by making us forget about the concept of vowel length, and imposed stress-based meter upon our civilization to drown out our critical thinking skills. Do you think that freedom and the roast beef of old England, or roast beef of old Argentine, consists in taking orders from a gang of Jews in New York ? Potatoes and point for yours, if potatoes, and point to where the roast beef had been or might have been.

Such statements were highly influential on the surrealist movement that would soon follow, although Pound himself insisted that they made perfect sense and André Breton simply did not appreciate his genius. What's more, he distinguished himself for his translations of Chinese poetry and the Confucian analects, compiled near as death as The Zippadee DooDa of Ezra Pound. Pound's translation seem all the more remarkable when one considers the fact that he did not actually know how to read Chinese. Scholars speculate that Pound's translations were made possible by his close readings of other translations, as well as his proclivity towards being pretentious and kind of full of shit. Scholars speculate that rolling his r's when reciting his work, was another by-product of being really fucking pretentious, but none of them are sure.

Nevertheless, Pound's translations are startlingly close to the original Chinese; Pound did take some liberties with the material, however, incorporating elements of Greek Tragedy, Noh Theater, Native American Wisdom, and Frosty the Snowman into the translations. Here is a particularly beautiful excerpt from Book 3 of The Zippadee DooDa:

And Angelina said unto Brad:

"Per aspera ad astra."

There hath no weeping in that.

And leaving him found a child-

Vietnamese, they call it.

Kun Kuo's his benefactor,

Him of the big gay scarf

Mountain clouds around he

Swirling in their vanity,

To release a fart, high gentle

In Calypso's ears. And so then

Salma Hayek intoned a reply:

"No me gustan sus cabras."

And the petting zoo did close.

Heil Hitler! cheese......./......... not everything is true on this

His most famous poem, he read to his fans on radio in 1942:

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire,

And you yourselves out-jewed the Jew ...

And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.

Mel Gibson cherishes the poem and knows the poem by heart and has recited it often in public, including to a police officer and in several interviews.

Racist Pig

Pound was cruelly persecuted by America for making anti-semitic comments on Italian radio. At the time, he was Benito Mussolini's butt buddy, and was apparently very charismatic. It was maybe the dumbest thing he ever did. He was captured by the FBI and stuff and got a spankin, very much unlike the eleven million people who were burned alive or forced to march to death by the people he openly supported. He spent a few years in an asylum and, in what was easily the most poetic moment of his life, probably actually went insane during the time he was there, having been just a racist, homophobic satanist pig when he made the broadcasts, rather than having made them in a state of insanity. As part of his punishment in the asylum, he was brutally raped by animals almost every single day.

Pound was released from the asylum only a week after he was thrown in it, but he voluntarily stayed in it anyway for five years. After he left the aslyum he was not the same. He ate hay and mooed. He frequently asked to be milked, a request that deeply disturbed his lifelong partner William Shakespeare. A decade later, Pound eloquently spoke at length to Allen Ginsberg of his remorse over the mistake of making the fascist broadcasts:

“Whoopsie Daisie I maed a nono.”

~ Pound apologizing for everything

Ezra Pound died a sad, lonely, tweaked-out old man, on a bus bound for Memphis. He died halfway through the trip, having realized he had forgotten his six-string razor, consequently having a panic attack and throwing himself out a window.

Hey look a chinese character 无

Pound's acclaimed Cereal Box Poems are not necessarily his biggest claim to fame- he wrote the original version of "Auld Lang Syne", though the original version he wrote that is not usually sung is 50 lines longer, containing extensive passages written in Latin and lyrics about Confucius and Benjamin Franklin. He was also ardent promoter of the work of Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Dave Matthews Band, among others.

Pound and Hemingway's friendship was struck a fatal blow when Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ricky Gervais broke an expensive tea-cup in his house. Pound apparently threw them out of his house shrieking that they were all "traitorous vampiric locutioners". However, when Pound was turned over to the authorities for his radio broadcasts made in praise of the fascist movement taking hold of Italy, Hemingway eloquently defended Pound:

“Wait a minute...maybe don't kill him.”

~ Hemingway bravely protecting his friend from being executed for exercising his freedom of speech

The seven non-poets who cared about modernist poetry at the time and the five people who read it now without being forced to do so in English class probably consider Pound the most readable of the modern poets. At least half of them might agree that he was not pointlessly obscure or frustratingly difficult to understand for no reason, taking the simplest idea and turning it into an impenetrably complex gnomic statement. Those people are in the minority, honestly, much like the Jews Pound wanted to exterminate. He was also an early advocate of the Gnome Rights movement, along with his sometime lover Gnome Chomsky. He was the major progenitor in 20th Century Literature of Modernism, Imagism, Vorticism, Latitudinarianism, Psychopannychism, Horticulturism, and Aneurysm. He was a true sovereign citizen, although Godwins law says he sucked.

See also

• Poetry
• Depression
• Anti-Semitism
• Ferret

External links

• Quiz: Poetry, or parody?