The Hindu : International : Ezra Pound back in from the cold

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 13, 2004

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International

Ezra Pound back in from the cold

London: Ezra Pound, the ``poets' poet'' who has been ostracised for 60 years because of his virulent anti-Semitism and support for Fascism, was honoured with an official blue memorial plaque on Wednesday. The plaque, from the U.K. culture body English Heritage, is a first chink of light in the cloud of infamy and disgrace which hangs over Pound's memory, although he was the godfather of literary modernism and midwife to some of the 20th century's greatest works — notably T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The ceremony in London brought applause from an audience of those who support him as an artist. One called it ``an event long overdue'' when the plaque was unveiled at the house in Kensington Church Walk, west London, where the U.S.-born writer lived from 1909 to 1914. The building is steeped in literary history. There Pound promoted the work of then unknown writers including Eliot and James Joyce, worked alongside W.B. Yeats and was visited by Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence and the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore. From there, he changed the course of poetry with his doctrine of Imagism.

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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