Ezra Pound

1885 - 1972

Ezra Pound was the ultimate literary connector. He didn’t just write; he acted as a high-octane scout for other talents. He was the one who edited T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land down from a bloated mess into a masterpiece, and he championed Joyce, Yeats, and Frost. His role was that of a curator of culture. He believed poetry was the "news that stays news," and he spent his life trying to fuse everything from Chinese characters to Greek myths into a massive, jagged, and sometimes inscrutable "total" poem, The Cantos.