Ezra Pound, who published his first poem in 1902 and his last in 1969, understood the necessity of context. The range, volume, and arcane nature of his material, as impressive as it was immense, required background which he expected of his readers. Initially, this meant knowledge of the Provençal poets, Dante, Confucius, and a healthy dose of Greek and Latin, as well as Chinese and American history. As editor, translator, anthologist, essayist, and poet, he anticipated that his readers would understand as well the sources, allusions, and origins of his work. The complex of materials was part of being modern.

Pound worked hard to educate his peers who recognized his skills. T.S. Eliot called him “il miglior fabbro,” “the better craftsman.” James Joyce declared he was “a miracle of ebulliency, gusto and help.” Yeats recalled that to “talk over a poem with him” was “like getting you to put a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural.” He redirected the poetry of Yeats, discovered Robert Frost, and promoted H.D. He edited The Waste Land, oversaw the publication of Ulysses, and created new movements like Imagism and Vorticism. Wyndham Lewis summed him up as the “demon pantechnicon driver, busy with removal of the old world into new quarters.”

Lives of Ezra Pound are never dull. Inescapably contextual, they are also polemical and political. His life has repeatedly, and perhaps too conveniently, been placed into one of those three slots, anticipating his frequent presentation as an agitator, editor, poet, economist, critic, and even crank.

Early portraits of Pound, often by contemporaries, emphasized his unusual personality and radical approach to poetry. In London between 1908 and 1920, articles spoke of his curious American manner, described as brash, flamboyant, and very much in the image of the radical poet. A parody in Punch (June 23, 1909) describes a “Mr. Ezekiel Ton” eager “to impress his personality on English editors” as “the newest poet going.” His original poetry blends “the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy.” A month later the Bookman (London) outlined his American pedigree, emphasizing his ancestors who “went out to the New World in the seventeenth century.” He is a distant relation of Longfellow and has supposedly written and burned two novels and 300 sonnets, a sign of his singular self criticism and productivity. And he is only twenty-three.

Pound himself contributed to the myth. In 1913 he published “How I Began” and by 1915 began to appear in Who’s Who with his own self-inscribed entry. It begins with “pound, ezra, m.a.; vorticist,” and continues to stress his education and travel, and that he is “informally literary executor for the late Ernest Fenollosa.” He then lists his publications and ends with “Recreations: fencing, tennis, searching The Times for evidence of almost incredible stupidity.” The entry stood until 1919, when he identifies himself as “poet; London Editor of The Little Review.” He also adds, after his remark about Fenollosa and work on Noh drama, that he is “a follower of Confucius and Ovid.” He also alters his Recreations to read “the public taste and that of Sir Owen Seaman.” Seaman was a parodist and editor of Punch from 1906 to 1932.

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.”