Ezra pound essays

In the lesson, we'll discuss a brief biography of the American poet, Ezra Pound. He was a member of poetry's Imagist movement in the early-mid 1900s. We'll also read and analyze a poem and essay excerpt. This lesson will conclude with a short, five-question multiple-choice quiz.

The first use of the word “Imagiste” was in my note to T. E. Hulme’s five poems, printed at the end of my “Ripostes” in the autumn of 1912. I reprint my cautions from Poetry for March, 1913. An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

Pound’s “A Retrospect,” published in 1918, is a collection of his essays on poetry. It includes “A Few Don’ts” which was originally published in Poetry in 1913 as “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” and “Prolegomena,” which first appeared in the Poetry Review in 1912.

Arriving in Italy in 1908 with only 80 dollars, Pound spent eight to have his first book of poems, A Lume Spento, printed in June, 1908, in an edition of 100 copies. An unsigned review appearing in the May 1909 issue of Book News Monthly noted, “French phrases and scraps of Latin and Greek punctuate his poetry. …