Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on 30 October 1885 in Hailey, in the Idaho Territory of the United States, and died on 1 November 1972 in Venice, Italy. Few writers altered the course of twentieth-century poetry as decisively as he did, and few have left behind a legacy so divided between artistic admiration and moral revulsion. Pound was a poet, editor, translator, critic, impresario, polemicist, and tireless orga…
“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“A classic can only occur when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony