In 1912, while Ezra Pound was living in London and working as unofficial secretary to William Butler Yeats, he was appointed Poetry’s first Foreign Correspondent. In this capacity he not only forwarded poems from his many contacts, including the then-unknown T.S. Eliot, but he also advised, harangued, and expounded. Together, America’s most controversial poet and its most enduring poetry magazine introduced literary Modernism to American readers whose taste had been dulled by the genteel, sentimental, and uplifting verse common to the newspapers and magazines of the time. Although Pound eventually fought with almost everyone (and his relationship with the magazine was often prickly) his generous support of fellow writers was legendary. Those to whom he offered much-needed recognition at crucial points early in their careers included James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. And Pound’s once-revolutionary pronouncements on poetry—that it should be as well-written as prose, that it should avoid cliché, sentiment, and stereotype, and that it should be “compose[d] in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome”—are the virtual DNA of nearly every poem written today.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885, but his family moved eighteen months later to Philadelphia, where his father was assistant assayer to the US Mint. Although Pound studied for two years at the University of Pennsylvania, meeting both Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams while he was there, he graduated from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching for two years, he sailed for Europe in 1908 and settled in London, which would remain his home for several years. As Yeats’s assistant, Pound found himself at the center of London’s cultural life, and he himself was an energetic supporter of movements, magazines, and manifestoes. His edits of Eliot’s The Waste Land helped make it the most influential English-language poem of the last century, and he encouraged his wife’s mother, the bookstore proprietor Olivia Shakespear, to publish Joyce’s Ulysses.

His own poetry underwent several transformations while he was in London. Between 1908 and 1911 Pound published several collections of verse, influenced by his reading of medieval Provencal and early Italian poetry. In 1912 his style was modernized through his association with the novelist Ford Madox Ford and the poet philosopher T.E. Hulme. During this time he presented to Poetry the work of two of his protegees, H.D. and Richard Aldington, calling them Imagistes. The characteristic Imagist poem is short-lined, spare, unmetered, and its lack of explicit symbolism demonstrates Pound’s belief that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Pound’s own poem “In a Station of the Metro,” which appeared in Poetry in 1913, remains the best example of Imagist work.

But Pound soon abandoned the delicacy and restrictions of Imagism for the more dynamic and challenging Vorticism; his friendships with post-Cubist, avant-garde visual artists suggested a new way of composing poems, combining images with allusions, quotations, foreign words, and prose fragments. This method enabled him to compose the Cantos. This formidable, rich, and ambitious “poem including history” would occupy him for the rest of his life. The first three cantos were published by Poetry in 1917. Later cantos were also published, until Harriet Monroe wrote to Pound in 1934: “I regret that the latter [Cantos XXXIV and XXXVII] is the last of your political manifestos which Poetry will care to have the honor of printing, but we shall always be hospitable to poems less motivated by a desire to instruct the world and the President.” Pound’s formal association with the magazine as its foreign correspondent had ended in 1919, but he continued to poke and prod and champion his favorite poets and principles from a distance.

Like many, Pound was disillusioned by World War I and the wastefulness and greed of the great powers, including England. He had married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914, and after leaving London for Paris in 1920, they moved to Italy four years later. Pound’s activities in the years that followed have overshadowed his accomplishments and the magnitude of his contributions to poetry. He denounced credit capitalism, became increasingly anti-Semitic, and his support of Mussolini led him to broadcast anti-capitalist diatribes over Italian radio to American troops during World War II. Pound was arrested in 1945, charged with treason, and held for six months by the Americans at Pisa before being returned to the United States. He was found unfit to stand trial and incarcerated in the mental hospital at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington D.C. He remained there until 1958, when he was released as the result of a campaign by a number of prominent figures in American letters, particularly Robert Frost.

On the occasion of Poetry’s Golden Anniversary in 1962, Pound was presented with the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize. Informed of the award, Pound responded by letter from Italy, “If it gives me a chance to admit the multitude & depth & gravity of my errors, go ahead. If it claims that I did advertise the magazine, & encourage Harriet, that may be a justification. I.e. that there were good years in which I was of some use to someone, go ahead. Yours sincerely Ezra Pound, a minor satirist who at one time contributed to the general liveliness by scratching a few barnacles off the language.”