The Tentative Blog Presents: Historical Hunk, 1st Edition

Okay Carla, if you're not even going to accept my invitation to author this blog I'm going to go ahead and make my first official post without your acknowledgment. HISTORICAL HUNK. I know how we both appreciate those. A few days ago in a slideshow on modernist manifestos, I caught a glimpse of this face:

EZRA POUND. Definitely looks like the most pompous man who ever penned a poem, but also one of the prettiest. I think he might even come in ahead of Lord Byron. Perhaps you have heard his most famous poem, "In A Station of the Metro"--look, I already have it memorized.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

Petals on a wet black bough. 

Basically, he wasn't as laudable a poet as some others on his scene, but he did hang out with T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce and Robert Frost, and told them all what to do, which I'd wager makes him COOL. Plus he was born in Idaho, so that's . . . something. Said Hemingway of Pound in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying . . . he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide." Great friend and great facial hair. Mmhmm.

AM