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Ezra Pound : An American Poet

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Ezra Pound was an American expatriate poet and a crucial figure in the early modernist movement. His famous contribution to the modernist movement was his influential work of developing the literary style of Imagism. His favoritism towards using musical properties in the poetical verse, and intense use of vivid imagery, helped to not only influence many other famous poets such as Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence, but also to change the literary world forever. Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory in 1858 to Homer and Isabel Pound. Pound knew from an early age that he wanted to be a poet. As a child, Pound was quick-witted, individualistic, extremely narcissistic, and unpopular. Pound, at the age of fifteen …show more content…

Question 3: What literary movements did Pound help to found? Through his unconventional writing style, Pound helped to create the Imagist movement from the ground up. What really made his new literary style so popular was his incorporation of different cultures into one language. Pound, after leaving the United States, took great interest in different literary styles from around the world. He especially admired East Asian (Japanese) and Italian artistic and literary concepts. Pound saw in these languages everything that he wanted for his own literary style. From the East Asian concepts, Pound admired the unique writing techniques and imagery that was present. From the Italian concepts, Pound admired how phonetic the language was and how the words seemed to flow from the tongue like a smooth river of musical tones. These concepts, among others, would be vital later in his new literary style that would come to be known as Imagism. Pound also became intrigued with the new 20th century art movement called vorticism. He liked the dynamic structure that vorticism offered. Vorticist poetry focused primarily on locating the movement and stillness within the image, which Pound favored tremendously. Pound also emphasized vorticism’s relationship to motion, and how the vortex represents the maximum point of energy and efficiency. He incorporated the vorticist ideals of energy and efficiency in his most famous unfinished work, “The Cantos.” With the

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