Ezra Pound

The Cantos is Pound's long, fragmentary poem cycle, built from history, economics, myth, Chinese texts, and personal memory. He worked on it for decades, and its difficulty is part of why Pound remains both central and controversial in modernist poetry.

Pound heavily edited T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land before its 1922 publication, cutting and reshaping large parts of the draft. Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound with the phrase 'il miglior fabbro,' meaning the better craftsman.

During World War II, Pound made fascist radio broadcasts in Italy, which led to his 1945 arrest by U.S. forces. He was later confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., instead of standing trial for treason.

Pound championed major modernist writers including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, H.D., and William Carlos Williams. His editorial and networking role made him one of the most influential literary figures around magazines such as Poetry and The Little Review.