“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”

American poet and critic

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American poet and critic, active in the early modernist movement. Born in 1885 and died in 1972, he is best known as a major modernist writer and for the controversial political role he played in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His work includes Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and The Cantos. Pound helped shape modernist poetry through his criticism as well as his verse, and his reputation remains tied both to literary innovation and to the politics of his later years.