Photo by Richard Avedon

It’s the birthday of the poet and critic Ezra Pound, born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. Pound is famous for championing the Modernist movement, and he did this by celebrating and encouraging other writers like W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. He is most famous for editing T.S. Eliot’s huge poem The Waste Land and eventually cutting out half of it.

Ezra Pound said, “Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

-from the Writer’s Almanac

And because I love listening to it, and because it’s Ezra’s birthday, and because no reason is really needed, here is audio of Ezra reading Sestina: Altaforte.