4pQonT

EZRA POUND 31
this unique currency, and used one of them as an illustration for
his own monetary theories.
His father sometimes allowed Ezra to stroll through the Mint,
and he has described to me one of his earliest memories, when he
watched men stripped to the waist as they shovelled heaps of
gold coins into large sacks. Perhaps this familiarity is responsible
for Ezra's apparent contempt for money as a personal possession,
since he has never made any effort to acquire it, or to become a
slave to it. He has been annoyed because the lack of money prevented
him from carrying out one of his many projects, or from
subsidizing other writers, but his regard for money is, to say the
least, an unconventional one.
One of Ezra's London friends, Phyllis Bottome, later described
his parents, whom she came to know well: "They were a quiet oldfashioned
and extremely pleasant type of American—common to
our early childhood, but less easily discerned now." 1
Homer Pound
was a civil servant when that profession was as highly regarded as
an occupation for an intelligent man as the law or the ministry.
Ezra grew up in a comfortable middle-class home of the 1890s, the
sort of place that only a millionaire can afford today. In 1900, he
leaped into the world of the arts by enrolling at the University of
Pennsylvania. He obtained the status of "special student", by stating
that he wished to avoid "irrelevant subjects".
Among Pound's closest friends during his student days were
William Carlos Williams, who was studying medicine at the graduate
school, and Hilda Doolittle, daughter of Professor Charles
Doolittle, Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University. Hilda
Doolittle, later known as the poetess H.D., was a student at Bryn
Mawr. Among her classmates there was Marianne Moore.
Williams had been introduced to Pound by a student named Van
Cleve. He relates that Pound often came to his dormitory room to
read aloud his poems. Some of these works later appeared in
Pound's first volume, A Lume Spento (1908). Pound was then
writing a sonnet a day. He burned the lot of them at the end of the
year. Williams also was engaged in writing poetry, an epic that he
was too shy to read to anyone. 2
"I was fascinated by the man," Williams writes of Pound. "He
was the liveliest, most intelligent and unexplainable thing I'd ever