Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound arrived in London in the early 20th century and built Imagism around precision and economy, then used his position as foreign editor to shepherd the century's literature into print: he serialized Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914, published Eliot's "Prufrock" in 1915, and pushed Ulysses into the world in 1918. World War I turned him toward obsession—he blamed the carnage on finance capitalism, called it "usury," and moved to Italy in 1924. Through the 1930s he promoted social credit theory, wrote for Oswald Mosley's fascist publications, and embraced Mussolini;…