This Guy Sucked Ezra Pound with Kristin Grogan (Subscriber Preview)
Apr 23, 2026
Kristin Grogan, a Rutgers Assistant Professor of English and author of Stitch, Unstitch, explores Ezra Pound as a major modernist and notorious fascist. She traces his influence on imagism and The Cantos. Short takes cover his suburban roots, antisemitism, translations from Fenollosa, and how modernism both broke with and reused the past.
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Pound As The Midwife Of Modernism
- Ezra Pound shaped modernism both by his own writing and by promoting others, acting as a self-styled male midwife of the movement.
- He edited and championed poets like T.S. Eliot and published key modernist works while simultaneously producing his long poem The Cantos.
The Cantos As A Lifelong Fragment
- Pound's primary literary endeavor was The Cantos, an evolving, unfinished long poem spanning decades and hundreds of pages.
- He wrote installments throughout his life; late illness and post-asylum publication left it fragmentary rather than conclusively finished.
Family Roots Shaped Pound's Preoccupations
- Pound's family background and early geography (born in Idaho, raised near Philadelphia) fed his later obsessions with money, heritage, and patrimony.
- His grandfather was a lumberman and congressman; his father worked as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint, shaping Pound's fixation on currency.
