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A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound's greatness as a man of letters - poet, translator, critic, editor, pedagogue, universal correspondent - made him a central figure in the literature of the twentieth century. He was an exotic and controversial character throughout his life, and his public career achieved melodrama in l945 when he was indicted on a charge of treason, for broadcasting Axis propaganda on Rome radio during the war. He was eventually confined to a Washington psychiatric hospital for thirteen years. The final period of his life, after his release and return to Italy, was as dramatic - and tragic - as anything that had gone before.
In this vigorous and fully documented biography Humphrey Carpenter carefully scrutinizes and often takes issue with the accepted valuation of Pound's achievements and his personality. He had access to Pound's vast correspondence - including highly revealing letters to his parents - and to medical records and confidential American government memoranda relating to Pound's indictment and trial. A Serious Character is rich in fascinating detail and acutely challenging in its judgements and commentary. Its title is taken from one of Pound's favourite sayings (first recorded in 1913): 'Are you or are you not, a serious character?'.
In this vigorous and fully documented biography Humphrey Carpenter carefully scrutinizes and often takes issue with the accepted valuation of Pound's achievements and his personality. He had access to Pound's vast correspondence - including highly revealing letters to his parents - and to medical records and confidential American government memoranda relating to Pound's indictment and trial. A Serious Character is rich in fascinating detail and acutely challenging in its judgements and commentary. Its title is taken from one of Pound's favourite sayings (first recorded in 1913): 'Are you or are you not, a serious character?'.
1005 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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About the author
Humphrey Carpenter
98 books89 followersHumphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society the Inklings. He won a Mythopoeic Award for his book The Inklings in 1982.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 28, 2020
This is my first book of Carpenter’s and not at all likely, given his Tolkien & Auden, to be my last. The man has a rather measured & efficient way of working through the weird, wild, and labyrinthine (not to mention LONG) life of one of those two literary magnificos whom Bob Dylan sings of as “fighting in the captain’s tower”.
There is much of use in this book for the young poet generally, insofar as he may learn by BOTH the successes & failures of his forebears, but most significantly for the proper understanding of the Cantos, which are often utterly impenetrable on their own (& maybe this goes without saying, for they are largely autobiographical in nature).
You may read it, lastly, if only to hear at the end the extraordinarily beautiful conversation between ole Ez & the young Allen Ginsberg, wherein the torch of poesy is effectually passed from one generation to the next. In that moment alone is the consummation of Poundian ideas belonging to different eras of his life: the top of the vortex, the making-it-new, the rose in the steel dust.
He tried to write Paradise & believes that he couldn’t, but it’s more likely, I think, that he wound up living it himself.
There is much of use in this book for the young poet generally, insofar as he may learn by BOTH the successes & failures of his forebears, but most significantly for the proper understanding of the Cantos, which are often utterly impenetrable on their own (& maybe this goes without saying, for they are largely autobiographical in nature).
You may read it, lastly, if only to hear at the end the extraordinarily beautiful conversation between ole Ez & the young Allen Ginsberg, wherein the torch of poesy is effectually passed from one generation to the next. In that moment alone is the consummation of Poundian ideas belonging to different eras of his life: the top of the vortex, the making-it-new, the rose in the steel dust.
He tried to write Paradise & believes that he couldn’t, but it’s more likely, I think, that he wound up living it himself.
July 5, 2023
Humphrey Carpenter’s A Serious Character: the Life of Ezra Pound is a valuable biography. Pound was a significant figure in early twentieth century modernism, and it is important that he be recognised for his contributions, but also for his shortcomings. Carpenter is very fair on both.
Ezra was born into an average small-town Idaho family of average means and small-town habits and ideas. Ezra, however, was remarkable, in a few ways. He was very intelligent, and creative. Of even greater ultimate importance, however, were some characteristics which would usually, and definitely in my assessment, be considered flaws. These were elements which remained with him throughout his life, and which may be considered to have held him back from the sort of achievements of which he dreamt, and of which he could possibly have been capable.
Perhaps the main flaws could have been less destructive if they had been present singularly; in combination, they were powerful.
The first issue was that Ezra was vain in the extreme, and remained convinced until near the end of his life that he was destined to be a remarkable person… in some area. That is the second flaw: Pound never settled on anything, he darted about from idea to idea or project to project. If one of his plans had been pursued with any persistence, he might have produced something of value.
At school, he was known as “Professor” because of his polysyllabic vocabulary, but he was a careless speller; he was moderately good at Latin but weak at Greek. When he went to a military academy, he was derisory about drill. When he was twelve, he and his mother were taken on a European art tour by his aunt. He consequently felt superior because of his first-hand encounters with the art works, and felt no need for further study.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania as a fifteen year old but, with his results mediocre, he switched after a year to a college in New York. He soon decided the move had been unwise and tried to return to Pennsylvania, but for apparently unknown reasons did not. He ultimately graduated, returned to Penn for an MA, then won a fellowship for study for a doctorate but argued with his supervising academics, enrolled for multiple courses and attended each for only a short time before disappearing. His thesis was not progressing and he did not bother to submit his record book at year’s end, and never returned. Thereafter, he was vituperative about the university, right up until the time they awarded him an honorary doctorate some thirty years later; he readily accepted it but then publicly argued on stage with another recipient. During his undergraduate studies, he joined the chess club and the fencing club and caused amusement more than regard in both fields. He seems to have valued them as arcane activities, more or less as striking CV entries, but was indifferent in both.
Carpenter quotes him, “‘I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do,’ he wrote twelve years later. ‘I resolved at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere.’” We could indulge that from a twelve year-old, perhaps from a fifteen year-old, but hardly from a man at 27 talking about himself as a thirty year-old.
In later life, he translated mediaeval French and Italian poetry, but without a strong knowledge of the original language, which was pointed out in reviews.
He made several fruitless attempts to establish a salon in London; he played around with Japanese and Chinese ideograms, but only as a dilletante dabbler (Carpenter reports “his belief that he could understand certain Chinese ideograms merely by staring at them.”), and he sought to translate Sextus Propertius despite his limited Latin, leading a University of Chicago professor to report that “‘ For sheer magnificence of blundering this is unsurpassable.’”
He wrote music reviews while proclaiming himself tone-deaf, and ignorant of musical notation. Eventually he began writing an opera, but did not complete it. He published How to Read despite admitting to reading little, and proposed a complete restructure of the reading curriculum.
Then in 1918 he encountered CH Douglas’s social credit writings, became convinced by them, and turned sharply to create his idea of expertise in economics, which eventually led to his involvement with Mussolini. He pushed his way into Mussolini’s circle, with his writing and radio broadcasts, although it is Carpenter’s conclusion that the Fascists were almost embarrassed by him, thinking him mad, and never replying to his communications.
I mentioned at the beginning of this review, two of Ezra Pound’s major flaws. His third, in my opinion, was that he assumed he could become an expert – in almost anything, apparently – without study or sustained hard work. This is amply demonstrated in the above paragraphs.
Much of Pound’s life seems to be encapsulated in a story Carpenter tells of his tennis-playing: Ezra would tell Giuseppe to hit anything that he himself missed, but otherwise to keep out of the way and leave it all to him. He would plunge wildly around the court, somehow managing to be in several places at once, so that very few volleys escaped him. Another young man who played with him describes ‘the Poundian brand of tennis’ as ‘eccentric, surprising, and scattershot, filled with bounding rushes, wheezes, shouts and many cries of “Egad” . It was evidently not only “the Poundian approach to tennis”, but “the Poundian approach to life.”
It is interesting that Pound became a confidant of a number of modernist authors. Most notable would be TS Eliot and James Joyce, both of whom valued, at times, his criticism of their work and his advice about modifications. His feel for poetry seems to have been perceptive, such that, if he had applied himself more purposefully to his own writing, he might well have produced much more worthy poetry. Meanwhile, he can be applauded for his assistance for Eliot and Joyce. And it might perhaps indicate a problem with modernism per se that his scattershot approach to poetry was not more frequently exposed.
His development of his “Cantos” caused some confusion: With thirty Cantos available in print, critics felt inclined to look for some evidence of structure and overall purpose in the work. Yeats had raised this matter with Ezra in Rapallo, saying that he had often found ‘some scene of distinguished beauty’ in a particular passage, but could not make out ‘why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order’. Ezra told him what he always told people who asked this question. ‘He explains,’ said Yeats, ‘that it will, when the hundredth Canto is finished, display a structure.’ But this time Ezra went further. He told Yeats it would be ‘a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the descent into Hades from Homer, a metamorphosis from Ovid, and mixed with these mediaeval or modern characters.’ An attempt at further elucidation might not have achieved its purpose: certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events… ABCD and then JKLM, and then each set of letters repeated, and then ABCD inverted and this repeated, and then a new element XYZ, then certain letters that never recur and then all sorts of combinations…”
I think Carpenter gets Pound’s realized achievements about right: “He was a dab hand at schoolboy mockery, and could produce some extremely funny if rather crude parodies, but the restraint and measured irony of the true satirist were not in his repertoire.” His wordplays (Yourpeeing for European; Yourup for Europe; the Nude Eel and Quackiatrist) are gently amusing but rarely as clever as Joyce’s. And Capenter is equally incisive on Pound’s overall methodology: His method might be summarised as, first, to have plenty of self-confidence; next, to lay his work out with a dash so that it looked plausible (for example, in his early attempts at musical notation he disguises his ignorance by the sheer flourish with which he jabs notes on the paper); and last, to get the ‘feel’ of a subject, picking up its jargon and the kind of questions that would interest real experts, thereby giving an impression of genuine knowledge…His performance was backed by an excellent memory, so that he retained, almost involuntarily, anything that had happened to catch his attention.
The final section of Ezra Pound’s life involved the post-war controversy attaching to his broadcasts from fascist Italy, and the subsequent trial and his incarceration in a mental hospital. Humphrey Carpenter is, again, very thorough and very fair, and his account of the part played by psychologists is fascinating. It was all a terribly sad ending, though, so that in the 1960s, increasingly ill, depressed, disconnected, he became convinced he had done wide damage, “evil”. “ ‘I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered… All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realised that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning… I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.’”
Ezra Pound was a man of significant talent, whose significant Icarus-like ambition was, perhaps only because of his significant flaws, never realised. One completes reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography feeling a much better acquaintance with Pound.
Ezra was born into an average small-town Idaho family of average means and small-town habits and ideas. Ezra, however, was remarkable, in a few ways. He was very intelligent, and creative. Of even greater ultimate importance, however, were some characteristics which would usually, and definitely in my assessment, be considered flaws. These were elements which remained with him throughout his life, and which may be considered to have held him back from the sort of achievements of which he dreamt, and of which he could possibly have been capable.
Perhaps the main flaws could have been less destructive if they had been present singularly; in combination, they were powerful.
The first issue was that Ezra was vain in the extreme, and remained convinced until near the end of his life that he was destined to be a remarkable person… in some area. That is the second flaw: Pound never settled on anything, he darted about from idea to idea or project to project. If one of his plans had been pursued with any persistence, he might have produced something of value.
At school, he was known as “Professor” because of his polysyllabic vocabulary, but he was a careless speller; he was moderately good at Latin but weak at Greek. When he went to a military academy, he was derisory about drill. When he was twelve, he and his mother were taken on a European art tour by his aunt. He consequently felt superior because of his first-hand encounters with the art works, and felt no need for further study.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania as a fifteen year old but, with his results mediocre, he switched after a year to a college in New York. He soon decided the move had been unwise and tried to return to Pennsylvania, but for apparently unknown reasons did not. He ultimately graduated, returned to Penn for an MA, then won a fellowship for study for a doctorate but argued with his supervising academics, enrolled for multiple courses and attended each for only a short time before disappearing. His thesis was not progressing and he did not bother to submit his record book at year’s end, and never returned. Thereafter, he was vituperative about the university, right up until the time they awarded him an honorary doctorate some thirty years later; he readily accepted it but then publicly argued on stage with another recipient. During his undergraduate studies, he joined the chess club and the fencing club and caused amusement more than regard in both fields. He seems to have valued them as arcane activities, more or less as striking CV entries, but was indifferent in both.
Carpenter quotes him, “‘I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do,’ he wrote twelve years later. ‘I resolved at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere.’” We could indulge that from a twelve year-old, perhaps from a fifteen year-old, but hardly from a man at 27 talking about himself as a thirty year-old.
In later life, he translated mediaeval French and Italian poetry, but without a strong knowledge of the original language, which was pointed out in reviews.
He made several fruitless attempts to establish a salon in London; he played around with Japanese and Chinese ideograms, but only as a dilletante dabbler (Carpenter reports “his belief that he could understand certain Chinese ideograms merely by staring at them.”), and he sought to translate Sextus Propertius despite his limited Latin, leading a University of Chicago professor to report that “‘ For sheer magnificence of blundering this is unsurpassable.’”
He wrote music reviews while proclaiming himself tone-deaf, and ignorant of musical notation. Eventually he began writing an opera, but did not complete it. He published How to Read despite admitting to reading little, and proposed a complete restructure of the reading curriculum.
Then in 1918 he encountered CH Douglas’s social credit writings, became convinced by them, and turned sharply to create his idea of expertise in economics, which eventually led to his involvement with Mussolini. He pushed his way into Mussolini’s circle, with his writing and radio broadcasts, although it is Carpenter’s conclusion that the Fascists were almost embarrassed by him, thinking him mad, and never replying to his communications.
I mentioned at the beginning of this review, two of Ezra Pound’s major flaws. His third, in my opinion, was that he assumed he could become an expert – in almost anything, apparently – without study or sustained hard work. This is amply demonstrated in the above paragraphs.
Much of Pound’s life seems to be encapsulated in a story Carpenter tells of his tennis-playing: Ezra would tell Giuseppe to hit anything that he himself missed, but otherwise to keep out of the way and leave it all to him. He would plunge wildly around the court, somehow managing to be in several places at once, so that very few volleys escaped him. Another young man who played with him describes ‘the Poundian brand of tennis’ as ‘eccentric, surprising, and scattershot, filled with bounding rushes, wheezes, shouts and many cries of “Egad” . It was evidently not only “the Poundian approach to tennis”, but “the Poundian approach to life.”
It is interesting that Pound became a confidant of a number of modernist authors. Most notable would be TS Eliot and James Joyce, both of whom valued, at times, his criticism of their work and his advice about modifications. His feel for poetry seems to have been perceptive, such that, if he had applied himself more purposefully to his own writing, he might well have produced much more worthy poetry. Meanwhile, he can be applauded for his assistance for Eliot and Joyce. And it might perhaps indicate a problem with modernism per se that his scattershot approach to poetry was not more frequently exposed.
His development of his “Cantos” caused some confusion: With thirty Cantos available in print, critics felt inclined to look for some evidence of structure and overall purpose in the work. Yeats had raised this matter with Ezra in Rapallo, saying that he had often found ‘some scene of distinguished beauty’ in a particular passage, but could not make out ‘why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order’. Ezra told him what he always told people who asked this question. ‘He explains,’ said Yeats, ‘that it will, when the hundredth Canto is finished, display a structure.’ But this time Ezra went further. He told Yeats it would be ‘a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the descent into Hades from Homer, a metamorphosis from Ovid, and mixed with these mediaeval or modern characters.’ An attempt at further elucidation might not have achieved its purpose: certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events… ABCD and then JKLM, and then each set of letters repeated, and then ABCD inverted and this repeated, and then a new element XYZ, then certain letters that never recur and then all sorts of combinations…”
I think Carpenter gets Pound’s realized achievements about right: “He was a dab hand at schoolboy mockery, and could produce some extremely funny if rather crude parodies, but the restraint and measured irony of the true satirist were not in his repertoire.” His wordplays (Yourpeeing for European; Yourup for Europe; the Nude Eel and Quackiatrist) are gently amusing but rarely as clever as Joyce’s. And Capenter is equally incisive on Pound’s overall methodology: His method might be summarised as, first, to have plenty of self-confidence; next, to lay his work out with a dash so that it looked plausible (for example, in his early attempts at musical notation he disguises his ignorance by the sheer flourish with which he jabs notes on the paper); and last, to get the ‘feel’ of a subject, picking up its jargon and the kind of questions that would interest real experts, thereby giving an impression of genuine knowledge…His performance was backed by an excellent memory, so that he retained, almost involuntarily, anything that had happened to catch his attention.
The final section of Ezra Pound’s life involved the post-war controversy attaching to his broadcasts from fascist Italy, and the subsequent trial and his incarceration in a mental hospital. Humphrey Carpenter is, again, very thorough and very fair, and his account of the part played by psychologists is fascinating. It was all a terribly sad ending, though, so that in the 1960s, increasingly ill, depressed, disconnected, he became convinced he had done wide damage, “evil”. “ ‘I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered… All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realised that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning… I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.’”
Ezra Pound was a man of significant talent, whose significant Icarus-like ambition was, perhaps only because of his significant flaws, never realised. One completes reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography feeling a much better acquaintance with Pound.
January 13, 2022
Although wags will say that Pound is 'Carpentered' here, this is still by far the best single-volume bio of EP, the bio I return to first for the odd detail. Derivative of earlier secondary sources, sometimes repeating unacknowledged the same misunderstandings and outright errors, and at the best of times Carpenter is not at his best with documentation of sources, but he's still where you want to go for a 1,000-page overview (as opposed to multi-thousand-page multi-volumes) of the life. Carpenter also doesn't beat you down with 'new' reading of poems you've known for years and don't need another lit-crit take on, which I've always found a plus, especially after later treatments that weigh a lot more.
December 6, 2013
I got this book in a lot, and I'm glad I did. Pound is interesting from a psychology perspective, having spent about a dozen years at St. Elizabeths Hospital. This was part of being indicted for treason because he supported Mussolini, and broadcasting radio programs in Italy. He had attitudes towards minorities and women which would not be acceptable today. The book has some good descriptions of what his mind felt like (wasp nest, upper part of brain being replaced by fluids, mainspring busted). Pound was associated with many other writers, including Frost, Eliot, Hemingway, H.D. (a Freud tie in)and Joyce. Here (restated, as I love to do) are his five important things to teach his daughter:
1. Don't lie, cheat or steal
2. Don't ask inconvenient questions; all countries have different customs
3. If you're suffering, it's because you aren't understanding the universe; suffering exists to make people think
4. don't judge others, except
understanding how what they are doing is part of a behavioral sequence
figuring out whether she might do what they are doing
5. If you don't like something, blame it on either the universe or on yourself
The information about how Pound and George Santayana got along is interesting. This will probably be a hard book to find reasonably priced, but worth the look.
1. Don't lie, cheat or steal
2. Don't ask inconvenient questions; all countries have different customs
3. If you're suffering, it's because you aren't understanding the universe; suffering exists to make people think
4. don't judge others, except
understanding how what they are doing is part of a behavioral sequence
figuring out whether she might do what they are doing
5. If you don't like something, blame it on either the universe or on yourself
The information about how Pound and George Santayana got along is interesting. This will probably be a hard book to find reasonably priced, but worth the look.
May 24, 2014
This is a very thorough and in depth biography of Pound. It is well known that Pound did some rather questionable things (to say the least) and Carpenter examines these things with a great precision that gives the reader a better understanding of Pound's sanity. The flaw with this book, however, is that it seems that Carpenter has no respect for Pound the poet at any point in his career.
January 23, 2010
The best book about Ezra Pound's life and trials. It's more than 900 pages and it took me a whole month, but I enjoy it. Ezra Pound was definitely an eccentric character and, yes, a serious one...
August 27, 2025
Humphrey Carpenter “Ciddi bir karakter” adlı biyografide Ezra Pound’u ve eserlerini derinlemesine inceliyor, daha önceden bilinmeyen ya da yanlış bilinen konuları, olayları aydınlatıyor. Carpenter bu çalışmada Ezra Pound’un hayatı boyunca ailesine ve dostlarına yazdığı ve yaşadığı her şeyi anlatan mektupları da dahil olmak üzere birçok yazışmalarından, kızı Mary’nin anılarından yararlanmış. Pound’un iddianamesi ve yargılanmasıyla ilgili gizli Amerikan hükümet muhtıralarına, doktorların raporlarına ulaşmış.
Carpenter Pound’a ve eserlerine tarafsız bir bakışa açısıyla yaklaşmış ve doğru anlatmaya çalışmış. Ezra Pound’un edebiyatını ve tartışmalı kişiliğini tüm yönleriyle ele almış. Sonuçta ortaya tamamı gerçeklere ve belgelere dayanan bir metin, bir roman kahramanı çıkmış. Metni adeta bir bildungs roman gibi okuyorsunuz. Sade ve akıcı bir dili var. Çok ayrıntılı olarak anlatıyor Pound’u ama ayrıntılarda boğulmuyor ki bu büyük bir meziyet.
Carpenter’in biyografisinden Pound’un tutarsız, çelişkilerle dolu bir yaşamı olduğunu anlıyoruz. Sık sık “deli mi dahi mi” diye sormadan edemiyorsunuz? Pound’la birlikte 20. yüzyılın başından itibaren gelişen edebiyat akımlarını, belli başlı yazar ve şairleri de tanıyoruz. Çünkü Pound’un özellikle İngiltere’de ve ABD’de çok geniş bir çevresi olmuş ve çok sayıda dostluk ve düşmanlık geliştrimiş. Carpenter bunları da bağlamdan yani Pound’un yaşam öyküsünden kopmadan anlatıyor. Bu çalışmayı Pound üzerine yazılmış en yetkin ve kapsamlı biyografi olarak değerlendirmişler, hak vermemek elde değil.
Carpenter Pound’a ve eserlerine tarafsız bir bakışa açısıyla yaklaşmış ve doğru anlatmaya çalışmış. Ezra Pound’un edebiyatını ve tartışmalı kişiliğini tüm yönleriyle ele almış. Sonuçta ortaya tamamı gerçeklere ve belgelere dayanan bir metin, bir roman kahramanı çıkmış. Metni adeta bir bildungs roman gibi okuyorsunuz. Sade ve akıcı bir dili var. Çok ayrıntılı olarak anlatıyor Pound’u ama ayrıntılarda boğulmuyor ki bu büyük bir meziyet.
Carpenter’in biyografisinden Pound’un tutarsız, çelişkilerle dolu bir yaşamı olduğunu anlıyoruz. Sık sık “deli mi dahi mi” diye sormadan edemiyorsunuz? Pound’la birlikte 20. yüzyılın başından itibaren gelişen edebiyat akımlarını, belli başlı yazar ve şairleri de tanıyoruz. Çünkü Pound’un özellikle İngiltere’de ve ABD’de çok geniş bir çevresi olmuş ve çok sayıda dostluk ve düşmanlık geliştrimiş. Carpenter bunları da bağlamdan yani Pound’un yaşam öyküsünden kopmadan anlatıyor. Bu çalışmayı Pound üzerine yazılmış en yetkin ve kapsamlı biyografi olarak değerlendirmişler, hak vermemek elde değil.
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