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Ezra Pound moved to London 100 years ago, filled with zeal to overthrow the old guard. James Campbell maps the poet's movements across the city that provided his inspiration

Saturday May 17, 2008. The Guardian

As soldiers do when marching into battle, Ezra Pound heralded his progress through London with songs. He arrived from Philadelphia 100 years ago, on a mission to liberate English verse: to throw out the leftover Victoriana - "nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard" - and replace it with "something for the modern stage". Like any other boisterous serviceman, Pound was unfussy about who heard him. "Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and the intolerant." How to attract such praise? "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions."

Pound's current heroes were the medieval troubadour poets of Provence, with some Italians and half-understood classic authors mixed in. The 23-year-old novitiate tramped the city's streets, incanting his "songs" in the doorways of literary journals - "Let us deride the smugness of the Times: GUFFAW!" (he means the Times Literary Supplement) - and along the corridors of the weekly magazines: "Go! rejuvenate things! Rejuvenate even the Spectator." After studying in the British Museum by day, he returned to his lodgings at night and wrote in a musical, overwrought, antiquated manner ("When I first saw thee 'neath the silver mist") that is apt to puzzle readers expecting to hear the first soundings of an English-based modernism. Within a year or two, however, the better aspects of the American character were drafted in:

Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.

He lived in London for 12 years, from 1908 to 1920, gradually widening his poetry to absorb natural forms of speech and, at the same time, the life of the city. If we could unearth Pound's copy of the London A-Z, it would be a heavily thumbed, scribbled-over, asterisked and earmarked volume. On arrival, he spent a few nights at Duchess Street, near the present site of BBC Broadcasting House, before taking lodgings a few minutes' walk away at 48 Langham Street. The house is still there, separated by a narrow alley from a mid-19th-century pub, the Yorkshire Grey, much the same in outline now as it was when Pound frequented it, possibly seeking refuge from "the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed". Both house and pub turn up in the Pisan Cantos, written 40 years later, as does a meeting in the street with Henry James... [Article continues]