This site brings together a biography, an excellent bibliography, selections from primary works, as well as a link to the Ezra Pound discussion list.

Academy of American Poets
http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/epounfst.htm

This site provides discussion of Pound's influence in defining the modernist aesthetic in poetry. It also includes e-texts of several works and audio of Pound's Canto I.

A Major Minor: Ezra Pound's Poetry
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jun99/lyons.htm

This recent article, by David Lyons, in the New Criterion--online discusses the contemporary import of Pound's work.

BIOGRAPHY
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but grew up in Philadelphia, where his father worked at the U.S. Mint. He received his BA from Hamilton College, then returned to Pennsylvania for an MA in Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania. While a student there he was engaged to Hilda Doolittle, a student at Bryn Mawr College. Although they never married, Pound was to become a major influence on her life.

With eighty dollars he sailed for Europe, and after brief stays in Spain and Italy, he moved to London, where he stayed until 1920. He had already begun publishing his own poetry, and the appearance of his book, Personae, in London just after his arrival in 1910 attracted the attention of several of the younger English writers, including Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Richard Aldington. With Hilda Doolittle, who came to London in 1911, and her husband, Richard Aldington, he founded the literary movement called imagism.

By 1920 London had become "barren," so Pound moved to Paris for four years, then to Italy, where he remained, except for a controversial period in a mental hospital in the United States, for the rest of his life. While still in London he had begun work on a long poem, Cantos. What was evident in Cantos was that Pound was anti-Semitic and a radical social critic. When World War II broke out he was employed by the Italian government to write and deliver twice-weekly fascist propaganda broadcasts attacking the U.S. war effort. In some of the programs, he supported the destruction of European Jewry. Under U.S. law this was treason, and when the U.S. Army liberated Italy, Pound was imprisoned in a cage outside of Pisa for several months, then returned to the United States for trial.

Influential friends managed to have him hospitalized for mental illness, and there ensued a stormy controversy among American writers over whether Pound should or should not be tried as a traitor. He remained in the mental hospital from 1946 to 1958. Finally, he was declared incompetent to stand trial and was returned to Italy. When he reached Italian soil he delivered the old fascist salute for the benefit of the photographers and went back to writing the Cantos. In his last years he spoke only rarely and declared that his life's work was a "botch."