Biographical note

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He came to Europe in 1898 and settled in London, where he was to meet Yeats, Eliot, Ford, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1920 he moved to Paris, and later to Rapallo. His acquaintances by now included Joyce, Hemingway, Brancusi, Picabia, Cocteau, Antheil and C. H. Douglas. During the Second World War he broadcast over Rome Radio - for which, eventually, he was tried for treason in Washington. He was committed to a hospital for the insane, where he was held for thirteen years. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy, dying in Venice in 1972. His main publications include The Cantos (I-CXVII), Collected Shorter Poems, Translations, The Confucian Odes, Literary Essays, Guide to Kulchur, Selected Prose and ABC of Reading. Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. He published his first book of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. That same year, he moved to California and stayed there for the rest of his life, teaching at Berkeley and living in San Francisco. He published nine books of poetry, including The Man with Night Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid (2000). Gunn also published a Collected Poems (1994) and two collections of essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993). He was awarded many major prizes and fellowships from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Thom Gunn died in 2004.