ABSTRACT
Ezra Pound had the most controversial career of any 20th-century American poet, and his overall place in American literature is more fiercely disputed than that of any other Modernist. It has been persuasively argued by Pound's supporters that he had the greatest impact of any single poet on the development of Modernist poetry. Even T.S. Eliot, in dedicating his poem The Waste Land to Pound, called him "the better craftsman" (" il miglior fabbro"). Yet at the same time, Pound was a literary vagabond who never felt entirely at home in any culture. Where Eliot settled in England in 1914 and never left, Pound's restless energy led him to London in 1908, to Paris in 1920, and then to Rapallo, Italy, in 1925, where he would remain until the end of World War II. An exile who embraced Italian Fascism during the war and was later indicted for treason, Pound was unique among American writers in the extent of his involvement not only with the art and literature of his time but also with the events of world history in the first half of the 20th century. It is no surprise, then, that when Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1949-the first time his poetry had been celebrated in such a public forumthe event unleashed a severe criticism of his role as a poet in history as well as a heated debate concerning the relationship of art to politics.
