Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work
Volume 1 – The Young Genius, 1885-1920
By A. David Moody
Oxford University Press £25, 524 pages
FTbookshop price: £20

It is one of the weirder ironies of literary history that the experiment of modernist poetry in English was launched by a pair of Americans living in London who had little but contempt for the complacent, hide-bound literary scene in which they moved. The only poet living in the capital respected by both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was W.B. Yeats – and even he, they agreed, needed “modernising”.

Pound lived in London from 1908 to 1920. He was 23 when he arrived, fresh from Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which had sacked him from his teaching job after he was caught having breakfast in his lodgings with an English variety actress.

From the day he arrived in London, Pound started hustling – it is perhaps no coincidence that one of his uncles was a peddler of snake oil. His mission was to create a revolution in poetic language and taste. His early work reveals a steady movement from the decadent cliches of late Victorianism towards a vigorous use of the precise and the colloquial. It was his firm belief that this revolution in language would foment an analogous one in politics.

His years in London were devoted partly to learning to write in a modern way – paradoxically, by immersing himself in the poetry of Dante, and classical China). But he also assembles an elite squad of avant-garde writers to launch a decisive attack on everyone else’s corrupt taste. By 1915 this included Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Their assault would culminate seven years later in the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, to both of which Pound acted, in his own phrase, as “midwife”.

The story of Pound’s early years is riveting, and well told by David Moody. He pays more attention to the poetry than earlier Pound biographers, and makes good use of unpublished letters. For all his arrogance, the young Pound was often right in his literary judgements.

One’s heart sinks, though, when the economist Clifford Douglas enters the scene in 1919, and Pound’s disastrous attempts to make sense of credit and capital begin. They would lead to growing admiration for Mussolini, unhinged anti-Semitic rants on Italian radio (and in The Cantos), his infamous captivity in an open cage in Pisa, and the strange decision that faced the American authorities in 1946: should they hang one of the country’s greatest ever poets for treason?

Mark Ford is co-editor of ‘Something We Have That They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations Since 1925’ (Iowa University Press)