“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.”

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.