title: Table tennis

text: The push (or "slice" in Asia) is usually used for keeping the point alive and creating offensive opportunities. A push resembles a tennis slice: the racket cuts underneath the ball, imparting backspin and causing the ball to float slowly to the other side of the table. A push can be difficult to attack because the backspin on the ball causes it to drop toward the table upon striking the opponent's racket. In order to attack a push, a player must usually loop (if the push is long) or flip (if the push is short) the ball back over the net. Often, the best option for beginners is to simply push the ball back again, resulting in pushing rallies. Against good players, it may be the worst option because the opponent will counter with a loop, putting the first player in a defensive position. Pushing can have advantages in some circumstances, such as when the opponent makes easy mistakes.


title: Table tennis

text: A chop is the defensive, backspin counterpart to the offensive loop drive. A chop is essentially a bigger, heavier push, taken well back from the table. The racket face points primarily horizontally, perhaps a little bit upward, and the direction of the stroke is straight down. The object of a defensive chop is to match the topspin of the opponent's shot with backspin. A good chop will float nearly horizontally back to the table, in some cases having so much backspin that the ball actually "rises". Such a chop can be "extremely" difficult to return due to its enormous amount of backspin. Some defensive players can also impart no-spin or sidespin variations of the chop. Some famous choppers include Joo Sae-hyuk and Wu Yang.


title: Table tennis

text: A block is executed by simply placing the racket in front of the ball right after the ball bounces; thus, the ball rebounds back toward the opponent with nearly as much energy as it came in with. This requires precision, since the ball's spin, speed, and location all influence the correct angle of a block. It is very possible for an opponent to execute a perfect loop, drive, or smash, only to have the blocked shot come back just as fast. Due to the power involved in offensive strokes, often an opponent simply cannot recover quickly enough to return the blocked shot, especially if the block is aimed at an unexpected side of the table. Blocks almost always produce the same spin as was received, many times topspin.


title: Table tennis

text: The defensive lob propels the ball about five metres in height, only to land on the opponent's side of the table with great amounts of spin. The stroke itself consists of lifting the ball to an enormous height before it falls back to the opponent's side of the table. A lob can have nearly any kind of spin. Though the opponent may "smash" the ball hard and fast, a good defensive lob could be more difficult to return due to the unpredictability and heavy amounts of the spin on the ball. Thus, though backed off the table by tens of feet and running to reach the ball, a good defensive player can still win the point using good lobs. The lob is used less frequently by professional players. A notable exception is Michael Maze.


title: Table tennis

text: Adding spin onto the ball causes major changes in table tennis gameplay. Although nearly every stroke or serve creates some kind of spin, understanding the individual types of spin allows players to defend against and use different spins effectively.


title: Table tennis

text: Backspin is where the bottom half of the ball is rotating away from the player, and is imparted by striking the base of the ball with a downward movement. At the professional level, backspin is usually used defensively in order to keep the ball low. Backspin is commonly employed in service because it is harder to produce an offensive return, though at the professional level most people serve sidespin with either backspin or topspin. Due to the initial lift of the ball, there is a limit on how much speed with which one can hit the ball without missing the opponent's side of the table. However, backspin also makes it harder for the opponent to return the ball with great speed because of the required angular precision of the return. Alterations are frequently made to regulations regarding equipment in an effort to maintain a balance between defensive and offensive spin choices. It is actually possible to smash with backspin offensively, but only on high balls that are close to the net.


title: Table tennis

text: The topspin stroke has a smaller influence on the first part of the ball curve. Like the backspin stroke, however, the axis of spin remains roughly perpendicular to the trajectory of the ball thus allowing for the Magnus effect to dictate the subsequent curvature. After the apex of the curve, the ball dips downwards as it approaches the opposing side, before bouncing. On the bounce, the topspin will accelerate the ball, much in the same way that a wheel which is already spinning would accelerate upon making contact with the ground. When the opponent attempts to return the ball, the topspin causes the ball to jump upwards and the opponent is forced to compensate for the topspin by adjusting the angle of his or her racket. This is known as "closing the racket".


title: Table tennis

text: The speed limitation of the topspin stroke is minor compared to the backspin stroke. This stroke is the predominant technique used in professional competition because it gives the opponent less time to respond. In table tennis topspin is regarded as an offensive technique due to increased ball speed, lower bio-mechanical efficiency and the pressure that it puts on the opponent by reducing reaction time. (It is possible to play defensive topspin-lobs from far behind the table, but only highly skilled players use this stroke with any tactical efficiency.) Topspin is the least common type of spin to be found in service at the professional level, simply because it is much easier to attack a top-spin ball that is not moving at high speed.


title: Table tennis

text: This type of spin is predominantly employed during service, wherein the contact angle of the racket can be more easily varied. Unlike the two aforementioned techniques, sidespin causes the ball to spin on an axis which is vertical, rather than horizontal. The axis of rotation is still roughly perpendicular to the trajectory of the ball. In this circumstance, the Magnus effect will still dictate the curvature of the ball to some degree. Another difference is that, unlike backspin and topspin, sidespin will have relatively very little effect on the bounce of the ball, much in the same way that a spinning top would not travel left or right if its axis of rotation were exactly vertical. This makes sidespin a useful weapon in service, because it is less easily recognized when bouncing, and the ball "loses" less spin on the bounce. Sidespin can also be employed in offensive rally strokes, often from a greater distance, as an adjunct to topspin or backspin. This stroke is sometimes referred to as a "hook". The hook can even be used in some extreme cases to circumvent the net when away from the table.


title: Table tennis

text: Players employ this type of spin almost exclusively when serving, but at the professional level, it is also used from time to time in the lob. Unlike any of the techniques mentioned above, corkspin (or "drill-spin") has the axis of spin relatively parallel to the ball's trajectory, so that the Magnus effect has little or no effect on the trajectory of a cork-spun ball: upon bouncing, the ball will dart right or left (according to the direction of the spin), severely complicating the return. In theory, this type of spin produces the most obnoxious effects, but it is less strategically practical than sidespin or backspin, because of the limitations that it imposes upon the opponent during their return. Aside from the initial direction change when bouncing, unless it goes out of reach, the opponent can counter with "either" topspin or backspin. A backspin stroke is similar in the fact that the corkspin stroke has a lower maximum velocity, simply due to the contact angle of the racket when producing the stroke. To impart a spin on the ball which is parallel to its trajectory, the racket must be swung more or less perpendicular to the trajectory of the ball, greatly limiting the forward momentum that the racket transfers to the ball. Corkspin is almost always mixed with another variety of spin since alone, it is not only less effective but also harder to produce.


title: Table tennis

text: Competitive table tennis is popular in East Asia and Europe, and has been gaining attention in the United States. The most important international competitions are the World Table Tennis Championships, the Table Tennis World Cup, the Olympics and the ITTF World Tour. Continental competitions include the following:


title: Table tennis

text: Chinese players have won 60% of the men's World Championships since 1959; in the women's competition for the Corbillon Cup, Chinese players have won all but three of the World Championships since 1971. Other strong teams come from East Asia and Europe, including countries such as Austria, Belarus, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.


title: Table tennis

text: There are professional competitions at the clubs level; the respective leagues of Austria, Belgium, China (China Table Tennis Super League), Japan (T.League), France, Germany (Bundesliga), and Russia are examples of the highest level. There are also some important international club teams competitions such as the European Champions League and its former competitor, the European Club Cup, where the top club teams from European countries compete.


title: Table tennis

text: According to the "New York Times", 31% of the table tennis players at the 2016 Summer Olympics were naturalized. The rate was twice as high as the next sport, basketball, which featured 15% of naturalized players.


title: Table tennis

text: Feng Tianwei, a Chinese-born player representing Singapore, has medaled in three Olympic table tennis events, more medals than native Singaporeans have won in all other sports combined (two). These successes have been somewhat controversial in Singapore. In 2014, Singapore Table Tennis Association's president Lee Bee Wah quit over this issue; her successor, Ellen Lee, later favored the application for citizenship of Zeng Jian, a China-born paddler.


title: Table tennis

text: The rate of naturalization accelerated after the ITTF's 2009 decision (one year after China won every possible Olympic medal in the sport) to reduce the number of entries per association in both the Olympics and the World Table Tennis Championships.


title: Table tennis

text: In 2019, the ITTF adopted new regulations which state that players who acquired a new nationality may not represent their new association before:


title: Table tennis

text: An official hall of fame exists at the ITTF Museum. A "Grand Slam" is earned by a player who wins singles crowns at the Olympic Games, World Championships, and World Cup. Jan-Ove Waldner of Sweden first completed the grand slam at 1992 Olympic Games. Deng Yaping of China is the first female recorded at the inaugural Women's World Cup in 1996. The following table presents an exhaustive list of all players to have completed a grand slam.


title: Table tennis

text: Jean-Philippe Gatien, Wang Hao and Fan Zhendong won both the World Championships and the World Cup, but lost in the gold medal matches at the Olympics. Jörgen Persson also won the titles except the Olympic Games. Persson is one of the five table tennis players to have competed at seven Olympic Games. Ma Lin and Chen Meng won both the Olympic gold and the World Cup, but lost in the finals of the World Championships.


title: Table tennis

text: Founded in 1926, the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) is the worldwide governing body for table tennis, which maintains an international ranking system in addition to organizing events like the World Table Tennis Championships. In 2007, the governance for table tennis for persons with a disability was transferred from the International Paralympic Committee to the ITTF.


title: Table tennis

text: On many continents, there is a governing body responsible for table tennis on that continent. For example, the European Table Tennis Union (ETTU) is the governing body responsible for table tennis in Europe. There are also national bodies and other local authorities responsible for the sport, such as USA Table Tennis (USATT), which is the national governing body for table tennis in the United States.


title: Table tennis

text: Hardbat table tennis uses rackets with short outward "pips" and no sponge, resulting in decreased speeds and reduced spin. World Championship of Ping Pong uses old-fashioned wooden paddles covered with sandpaper.


title: Table tennis

text: Round the World (also called Round Robin or Round the Table) table tennis is an informal party-type variation in which players line up on either side of the table. When a player hits the ball he sets the paddle down, and the player behind him picks it up to receive the return. When a player sets down his paddle, he moves to the line at the opposing side of the table. Players are eliminated as they lose a point. When only 2 players remain, a player hits the ball, sets his paddle down, spins and then retrieves his paddle to make the return.


title: Olive

text: The olive, botanical name Olea europaea, meaning 'European olive' in Latin, is a species of small tree or shrub in the family Oleaceae, found traditionally in the Mediterranean Basin. When in shrub form, it is known as "Olea europaea" 'Montra', dwarf olive, or little olive. The species is cultivated in all the countries of the Mediterranean, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, North and South America and South Africa. "Olea europaea" is the type species for the genus "Olea".


title: Olive

text: The olive's fruit, also called an "olive", is of major agricultural importance in the Mediterranean region as the source of olive oil; it is one of the core ingredients in Mediterranean cuisine. The tree and its fruit give their name to the plant family, which also includes species such as lilac, jasmine, forsythia, and the true ash tree.


title: Olive

text: Thousands of cultivars of the olive tree are known. Olive cultivars may be used primarily for oil, eating, or both. Olives cultivated for consumption are generally referred to as "table olives". About 90% of all harvested olives are turned into oil, while about 10% are used as table olives.


title: Olive

text: The word "olive" derives from Latin ' ("olive fruit", "olive tree"), possibly through Etruscan 𐌀𐌅𐌉𐌄𐌋𐌄 ("eleiva") from the archaic Proto-Greek form *ἐλαίϝα (*"elaíwa") (Classic Greek ', "olive fruit", "olive tree"). The word "oil" originally meant "olive oil", from ', (', "olive oil"). Also in multiple other languages the word for "oil" ultimately derives from the name of this tree and its fruit. The oldest attested forms of the Greek words are the Mycenaean , ', and , ' or , "", written in the Linear B syllabic script.


title: Olive

text: The olive tree, "Olea europaea", is an evergreen tree or shrub native to Mediterranean Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is short and squat and rarely exceeds in height. 'Pisciottana', a unique variety comprising 40,000 trees found only in the area around Pisciotta in the Campania region of southern Italy, often exceeds this, with correspondingly large trunk diameters. The silvery green leaves are oblong, measuring long and wide. The trunk is typically gnarled and twisted.


title: Olive

text: The small, white, feathery flowers, with ten-cleft calyx and corolla, two stamens, and bifid stigma, are borne generally on the previous year's wood, in racemes springing from the axils of the leaves.


title: Olive

text: The fruit is a small drupe long when ripe, thinner-fleshed and smaller in wild plants than in orchard cultivars. Olives are harvested in the green to purple stage. Canned black olives have sometimes been artificially blackened and may contain the chemical ferrous gluconate to improve the appearance. "Olea europaea" contains a pyrena commonly referred to in American English as a "pit", and in British English as a "stone".


title: Olive

text: The subspecies "O. e. cerasiformis" is tetraploid, and "O. e. maroccana" is hexaploid. Wild-growing forms of the olive are sometimes treated as the species "Olea oleaster", or "oleaster." The trees referred to as "white" and "black" olives in Southeast Asia are not actually olives but species of "Canarium".


title: Olive

text: Hundreds of cultivars of the olive tree are known. An olive's cultivar has a significant impact on its color, size, shape, and growth characteristics, as well as the qualities of olive oil. Olive cultivars may be used primarily for oil, eating, or both. Olives cultivated for consumption are generally referred to as "table olives".


title: Olive

text: Since many olive cultivars are self-sterile or nearly so, they are generally planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one. In recent times, efforts have been directed at producing hybrid cultivars with qualities useful to farmers, such as resistance to disease, quick growth, and larger or more consistent crops.


title: Olive

text: Fossil evidence indicates the olive tree had its origins 20–40 million years ago in the Oligocene, in what is now corresponding to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean Basin. Around 100,000 years ago, olives were used by humans in Africa, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, for fuel management and most probably for consumption. Wild olive trees, or oleasters, were present and collected in the Eastern Mediterranean since ~19,000 BP. The genome of cultivated olives reflects their origin from oleaster populations in the Eastern Mediterranean. The olive plant was first cultivated some 7,000 years ago in Mediterranean regions.


title: Olive

text: For thousands of years olives were grown primarily for lamp oil, with little regard for culinary flavor. Its origin can be traced to the Levant based on written tablets, olive pits, and wood fragments found in ancient tombs. As far back as 3000 BC, olives were grown commercially in Crete; they may have been the source of the wealth of the Minoan civilization.


title: Olive

text: The ancestry of the cultivated olive is unknown. Fossil "olea" pollen has been found in Macedonia and other places around the Mediterranean, indicating that this genus is an original element of the Mediterranean flora. Fossilized leaves of "olea" were found in the palaeosols of the volcanic Greek island of Santorini and dated to about 37,000 BP. Imprints of larvae of olive whitefly "Aleurobus olivinus" were found on the leaves. The same insect is commonly found today on olive leaves, showing that the plant-animal co-evolutionary relations have not changed since that time. Other leaves found on the same island are dated back to 60,000 BP, making them the oldest known olives from the Mediterranean.


title: Olive

text: Olives are not native to the Americas. Spanish colonists brought the olive to the New World, where its cultivation prospered in present-day Peru, Chile, and Argentina. The first seedlings from Spain were planted in Lima by Antonio de Rivera in 1560. Olive tree cultivation quickly spread along the valleys of South America's dry Pacific coast where the climate was similar to the Mediterranean. Spanish missionaries established the tree in the 18th century in California. It was first cultivated at Mission San Diego de Alcalá in 1769 or later around 1795. Orchards were started at other missions, but in 1838, an inspection found only two olive orchards in California. Cultivation for oil gradually became a highly successful commercial venture from the 1860s onward.


title: Olive

text: In Japan, the first successful planting of olive trees happened in 1908 on Shodo Island, which became the cradle of olive cultivation in Japan.


title: Olive

text: An estimated 865 million olive trees were in the world as of 2005, and the vast majority of these were found in Mediterranean countries, with traditionally marginal areas accounting for no more than 25% of olive-planted area and 10% of oil production.


title: Olive

text: Olive oil has long been considered sacred and holy. The olive branch has often been a symbol of abundance, glory, and peace. The leafy branches of the olive tree were ritually offered to deities and powerful figures as emblems of benediction and purification, and they were used to crown the victors of friendly games and bloody wars. Today, olive oil is still used in many religious ceremonies. Over the years, the olive has also been used to symbolize wisdom, fertility, power, and purity.


title: Olive

text: Olives are thought to have been domesticated in the third millennium BC at the latest, at which point they, along with grain and grapes, became part of Colin Renfrew's triad of Greek staple crops that fueled the emergence of more complex societies. Olives, and especially (perfumed) olive oil, became a major export product during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. Dutch archaeologist Jorrit Kelder proposed that the Mycenaeans sent shipments of olive oil, probably alongside live olive branches, to the court of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten as a diplomatic gift. In Egypt, these imported olive branches may have acquired ritual meanings, as they are depicted as offerings on the wall of the Aten temple and were used in wreaths for the burial of Tutankhamun. It is likely that, as well as being used for culinary purposes, olive oil was also used to various other ends, including as a perfume.


title: Olive

text: The ancient Greeks smeared olive oil on their bodies and hair as a matter of grooming and good health. Olive oil was used to anoint kings and athletes in ancient Greece. It was burnt in the sacred lamps of temples and was the "eternal flame" of the original Olympic games. Victors in these games were crowned with its leaves. In Homer's "Odyssey", Odysseus crawls beneath two shoots of olive that grow from a single stock, and in the "Iliad", (XVII.53ff) there is a metaphoric description of a lone olive tree in the mountains, by a spring; the Greeks observed that the olive rarely thrives at a distance from the sea, which in Greece invariably means up mountain slopes. Greek myth attributed to the primordial culture-hero Aristaeus the understanding of olive husbandry, along with cheese-making and bee-keeping. Olive was one of the woods used to fashion the most primitive Greek cult figures, called "xoana", referring to their wooden material; they were reverently preserved for centuries.


title: Olive

text: It was purely a matter of local pride that the Athenians claimed that the olive grew first in Athens. In an archaic Athenian foundation myth, Athena won the patronage of Attica from Poseidon with the gift of the olive. According to the fourth-century BC father of botany, Theophrastus, olive trees ordinarily attained an age around 200 years, he mentions that the very olive tree of Athena still grew on the Acropolis; it was still to be seen there in the second century AD; and when Pausanias was shown it c. 170 AD, he reported "Legend also says that when the Persians fired Athens the olive was burnt down, but on the very day it was burnt it grew again to the height of two cubits." Indeed, olive suckers sprout readily from the stump, and the great age of some existing olive trees shows that it was possible that the olive tree of the Acropolis dated to the Bronze Age. The olive was sacred to Athena and appeared on the Athenian coinage.


title: Olive

text: Theophrastus, in "On the Causes of Plants", does not give as systematic and detailed an account of olive husbandry as he does of the vine, but he makes clear (in 1.16.10) that the cultivated olive must be vegetatively propagated; indeed, the pits give rise to thorny, wild-type olives, spread far and wide by birds. Theophrastus reports how the bearing olive can be grafted on the wild olive, for which the Greeks had a separate name, "kotinos". In his "Enquiry into Plants" (2.1.2–4) he states that the olive can be propagated from a piece of the trunk, the root, a twig, or a stake.


title: Olive

text: According to Pliny the Elder, a vine, a fig tree, and an olive tree grew in the middle of the Roman Forum; the olive was planted to provide shade (the garden plot was recreated in the 20th century). The Roman poet Horace mentions it in reference to his own diet, which he describes as very simple: "As for me, olives, endives, and smooth mallows provide sustenance." Lord Monboddo comments on the olive in 1779 as one of the foods preferred by the ancients and as one of the most perfect foods.


title: Olive

text: Vitruvius describes of the use of charred olive wood in tying together walls and foundations in his "":


title: Olive

text: The thickness of the wall should, in my opinion, be such that armed men meeting on top of it may pass one another without interference. In the thickness there should be set a very close succession of ties made of charred olive wood, binding the two faces of the wall together like pins, to give it lasting endurance. For that is a material which neither decay, nor the weather, nor time can harm, but even though buried in the earth or set in the water it keeps sound and useful forever. And so not only city walls but substructures in general and all walls that require a thickness like that of a city wall, will be long in falling to decay if tied in this manner.


title: Olive

text: Olives were one of the main elements in ancient Israelite cuisine. Olive oil was used for not only food and cooking, but also lighting, sacrificial offerings, ointment, and anointment for priestly or royal office. The olive tree is one of the first plants mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), and one of the most significant. An olive branch (or leaf, depending on translation) was brought back to Noah by a dove to demonstrate that the flood was over (Book of Genesis 8:11).


title: Olive

text: The olive is listed in Deuteronomy 8:8 as one of the seven species that are noteworthy products of the Land of Israel. According to the Halakha, the Jewish law mandatory for all Jews, the olive is one of the seven species that require the recitation of "me'eyn shalosh" after they are consumed. Olive oil is also the most recommended and best possible oil for the lighting of the Shabbat candles.


title: Olive

text: The Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, is mentioned several times in the New Testament. The Allegory of the Olive Tree in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans refers to the scattering and gathering of Israel. It compares the Israelites to a tame olive tree and the Gentiles to a wild olive branch. The olive tree itself, as well as olive oil and olives, play an important role in the Bible.


title: Olive

text: The olive tree and olive oil are mentioned seven times in the Quran, and the olive is praised as a precious fruit. Olive tree and olive oil health benefits have been propounded in prophetic medicine. Muhammad is reported to have said: "Take oil of olive and massage with it – it is a blessed tree" (Sunan al-Darimi, 69:103). Olives are substitutes for dates (if not available) during Ramadan fasting, and olive tree leaves are used as incense in some Muslim Mediterranean countries.


title: Olive

text: The Great Seal of the United States first used in 1782 depicts an eagle clutching an olive branch in one of its talons, indicating the power of peace.


title: Olive

text: The olive tree, "Olea europaea", has been cultivated for olive oil, fine wood, olive leaf, ornamental reasons, and the olive fruit. About 90% of all harvested olives are turned into oil, while about 10% are used as table olives. The olive is one of the "trinity" or "triad" of basic ingredients in Mediterranean cuisine, the other two being wheat for bread, pasta, and couscous; and the grape for wine.


title: Olive

text: Olive oil is a liquid fat obtained from olives, produced by pressing whole olives and extracting the oil. It is commonly used in cooking, for frying foods or as a salad dressing. It is also used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and soaps, and as a fuel for traditional oil lamps, and has additional uses in some religions. Spain accounts for almost half of global olive oil production; other major producers are Portugal, Italy, Tunisia, Greece and Turkey. Per capita consumption is highest in Greece, followed by Italy and Spain.


title: Olive

text: The composition of olive oil varies with the cultivar, altitude, time of harvest and extraction process. It consists mainly of oleic acid (up to 83%), with smaller amounts of other fatty acids including linoleic acid (up to 21%) and palmitic acid (up to 20%). Extra virgin olive oil is required to have no more than 0.8% free acidity and is considered to have favorable flavor characteristics.


title: Olive

text: Table olives are classified by the International Olive Council (IOC) into three groups according to the degree of ripeness achieved before harvesting:


title: Olive

text: Raw or fresh olives are naturally very bitter; to make them palatable, olives must be cured and fermented, thereby removing oleuropein, a bitter phenolic compound that can reach levels of 14% of dry matter in young olives. In addition to oleuropein, other phenolic compounds render freshly picked olives unpalatable and must also be removed or lowered in quantity through curing and fermentation. Generally speaking, phenolics reach their peak in young fruit and are converted as the fruit matures. Once ripening occurs, the levels of phenolics sharply decline through their conversion to other organic products which render some cultivars edible immediately. One example of an edible olive native to the island of Thasos is the "throubes" black olive, which becomes edible when allowed to ripen in the sun, shrivel, and fall from the tree.


title: Olive

text: The curing process may take from a few days with lye, to a few months with brine or salt packing. With the exception of California style and salt-cured olives, all methods of curing involve a major fermentation involving bacteria and yeast that is of equal importance to the final table olive product. Traditional cures, using the natural microflora on the fruit to induce fermentation, lead to two important outcomes: the leaching out and breakdown of oleuropein and other unpalatable phenolic compounds, and the generation of favourable metabolites from bacteria and yeast, such as organic acids, probiotics, glycerol, and esters, which affect the sensory properties of the final table olives. Mixed bacterial/yeast olive fermentations may have probiotic qualities. Lactic acid is the most important metabolite, as it lowers the pH, acting as a natural preservative against the growth of unwanted pathogenic species. The result is table olives which can be stored without refrigeration. Fermentations dominated by lactic acid bacteria are, therefore, the most suitable method of curing olives. Yeast-dominated fermentations produce a different suite of metabolites which provide poorer preservation, so they are corrected with an acid such as citric acid in the final processing stage to provide microbial stability.


title: Olive

text: The many types of preparations for table olives depend on local tastes and traditions. The most important commercial examples are listed below.


title: Olive

text: Applied to green, semiripe, or ripe olives. Olives are soaked in salt water for 24-48 hours. Then they are slightly crushed with a rock to hasten the fermentation process. The olives are stored for a period of up to a year in a container with salt water, lemon juice, lemon peels, laurel and olive leaves, and rosemary. Some recipes may contain white vinegar or olive oil.


title: Olive

text: Most commonly applied to green olive preparation, around 60% of all the world's table olives are produced with this method. Olives are soaked in lye (dilute NaOH, 2–4%) for 8–10 hours to hydrolyse the oleuropein. They are usually considered "treated" when the lye has penetrated two-thirds of the way into the fruit. They are then washed once or several times in water to remove the caustic solution and transferred to fermenting vessels full of brine at typical concentrations of 8–12% NaCl. The brine is changed on a regular basis to help remove the phenolic compounds.


title: Olive

text: Fermentation is carried out by the natural microbiota present on the olives that survive the lye treatment process. Many organisms are involved, usually reflecting the local conditions or "terroir" of the olives. During a typical fermentation gram-negative enterobacteria flourish in small numbers at first but are rapidly outgrown by lactic acid bacteria species such as "Leuconostoc mesenteroides", "Lactobacillus plantarum", "Lactobacillus brevis" and "Pediococcus damnosus". These bacteria produce lactic acid to help lower the pH of the brine and therefore stabilize the product against unwanted pathogenic species. A diversity of yeasts then accumulate in sufficient numbers to help complete the fermentation alongside the lactic acid bacteria. Yeasts commonly mentioned include the teleomorphs "Pichia anomala", "Pichia membranifaciens", "Debaryomyces hansenii" and "Kluyveromyces marxianus".


title: Olive

text: Applied to green, semiripe and ripe olives, they are almost identical to the Spanish type fermentation process, but the lye treatment process is skipped and the olives are placed directly in fermentation vessels full of brine (8–12% NaCl). The brine is changed on a regular basis to help remove the phenolic compounds. As the caustic treatment is avoided, lactic acid bacteria are only present in similar numbers to yeast and appear to be outdone by the abundant yeasts found on untreated olives. As very little acid is produced by the yeast fermentation, lactic, acetic, or citric acid is often added to the fermentation stage to stabilize the process.


title: Olive

text: Applied to green, semi-ripe, or ripe olives, they are soaked in lye typically for longer periods than Spanish style (e.g. 10–72 hours) until the solution has penetrated three-quarters of the way into the fruit. They are then washed and immediately brined and acid corrected with citric acid to achieve microbial stability. Fermentation still occurs carried out by acidogenic yeast and bacteria but is more subdued than other methods. The brine is changed on a regular basis to help remove the phenolic compounds, and a series of progressively stronger concentrations of salt are added until the product is fully stabilized and ready to be eaten.


title: Olive

text: Applied to green, semi-ripe, or ripe olives, these are soaked in water or weak brine and this solution is changed on a daily basis for 10–14 days. The oleuropein is naturally dissolved and leached into the water and removed during a continual soak-wash cycle. Fermentation takes place during the water treatment stage and involves a mixed yeast/bacteria ecosystem. Sometimes, the olives are lightly cracked with a blunt instrument to trigger fermentation and speed up the fermentation process. Once debittered, the olives are brined to concentrations of 8–12% NaCl and acid corrected and are then ready to eat.


title: Olive

text: Applied only to ripe olives, since it is only a light fermentation. They are usually produced in Morocco, Turkey, and other eastern Mediterranean countries. Once picked, the olives are vigorously washed and packed in alternating layers with salt. The high concentration of salt draws the moisture out of olives, dehydrating and shriveling them until they look somewhat analogous to a raisin. Once packed in salt, fermentation is minimal and only initiated by the most halophilic yeast species such as "Debaryomyces hansenii". Once cured, they are sold in their natural state without any additives. So-called oil-cured olives are cured in salt, and then soaked in oil.


title: Olive

text: Applied to green and semi-ripe olives, they are placed in lye and soaked. Upon their removal, they are washed in water injected with compressed air, without fermentation. This process is repeated several times until both oxygen and lye have soaked through to the pit. The repeated, saturated exposure to air oxidises the skin and flesh of the fruit, turning it black in an artificial process that mimics natural ripening. Once fully oxidised or "blackened", they are brined and acid corrected and are then ready for eating.


title: Olive

text: Olive wood is very hard and is prized for its durability, colour, high combustion temperature, and interesting grain patterns. Because of the commercial importance of the fruit, slow growth, and relatively small size of the tree, olive wood and its products are relatively expensive. Common uses of the wood include: kitchen utensils, carved wooden bowls, cutting boards, fine furniture, and decorative items. The yellow or light greenish-brown wood is often finely veined with a darker tint; being very hard and close-grained, it is valued by woodworkers.


title: Olive

text: In modern landscape design olive trees are frequently used as ornamental features for their distinctively gnarled trunks and "evergreen" silvery gray foliage.


title: Olive

text: The earliest evidence for the domestication of olives comes from the Chalcolithic period archaeological site of Teleilat el Ghassul in modern Jordan. Farmers in ancient times believed that olive trees would not grow well if planted more than a certain distance from the sea; Theophrastus gives 300 stadia () as the limit. Modern experience does not always confirm this, and, though showing a preference for the coast, they have long been grown further inland in some areas with suitable climates, particularly in the southwestern Mediterranean (Iberia and northwest Africa) where winters are mild. An article on olive tree cultivation in Spain is brought down in Ibn al-'Awwam's 12th-century agricultural work, "Book on Agriculture".


title: Olive

text: Olives are cultivated in many regions of the world with Mediterranean climates, such as South Africa, Chile, Peru, Pakistan, Australia, Oregon, and California, and in areas with temperate climates such as New Zealand. They are also grown in the Córdoba Province, Argentina, which has a temperate climate with rainy summers and dry winters.


title: Olive

text: Olive trees show a marked preference for calcareous soils, flourishing best on limestone slopes and crags, and coastal climate conditions. They grow in any light soil, even on clay if well drained, but in rich soils, they are predisposed to disease and produce poor quality oil. (This was noted by Pliny the Elder.) Olives like hot weather and sunny positions without any shade, while temperatures below may injure even a mature tree. They tolerate drought well because of their sturdy and extensive root systems. Olive trees can remain productive for centuries as long as they are pruned correctly and regularly.


title: Olive

text: Only a handful of olive varieties can be used to cross-pollinate. 'Pendolino' olive trees are partially self-fertile, but pollenizers are needed for a large fruit crop. Other compatible olive tree pollinators include 'Leccino' and 'Maurino'. 'Pendolino' olive trees are used extensively as pollinizers in large olive tree groves.


title: Olive

text: Olives are propagated by various methods. The preferred ways are cuttings and layers; the tree roots easily in favourable soil and throws up suckers from the stump when cut down. However, yields from trees grown from suckers or seeds are poor; they must be budded or grafted onto other specimens to do well. Branches of various thickness cut into lengths around planted deeply in manured ground soon vegetate. Shorter pieces are sometimes laid horizontally in shallow trenches and, when covered with a few centimetres of soil, rapidly throw up sucker-like shoots. In Greece, grafting the cultivated tree on the wild tree is a common practice. In Italy, embryonic buds, which form small swellings on the stems, are carefully excised and planted under the soil surface, where they soon form a vigorous shoot.


title: Olive

text: The olive is also sometimes grown from seed. To facilitate germination, the oily pericarp is first softened by slight rotting, or soaked in hot water or in an alkaline solution.


title: Olive

text: In situations where extreme cold has damaged or killed the olive tree, the rootstock can survive and produce new shoots which in turn become new trees. In this way, olive trees can regenerate themselves. In Tuscany in 1985, a very severe frost destroyed many productive and aged olive trees and ruined many farmers' livelihoods. However, new shoots appeared in the spring and, once the dead wood was removed, became the basis for new fruit-producing trees.


title: Olive

text: Olives grow very slowly, and over many years, the trunk can attain a considerable diameter. A. P. de Candolle recorded one exceeding in girth. The trees rarely exceed in height and are generally confined to much more limited dimensions by frequent pruning. Olives are very hardy and are resistant to disease and fire. Its root system is robust and capable of regenerating the tree even if the above-ground structure is destroyed.


title: Olive

text: The crop from old trees is sometimes enormous, but they seldom bear well two years in succession, and in many cases, a large harvest occurs every sixth or seventh season. Where the olive is carefully cultivated, as in Liguria, Languedoc, and Provence, the trees are regularly pruned. The pruning preserves the flower-bearing shoots of the preceding year, while keeping the tree low enough to allow the easy gathering of the fruit. The spaces between the trees are regularly fertilized.


title: Olive

text: Various pathologies can affect olives. The most serious pest is the olive fruit fly ("Dacus oleae" or "Bactrocera oleae") which lays its eggs in the olive most commonly just before it becomes ripe in the autumn. The region surrounding the puncture rots, becomes brown, and takes a bitter taste, making the olive unfit for eating or for oil. For controlling the pest, the practice has been to spray with insecticides (organophosphates, e.g. dimethoate). Classic organic methods have been applied such as trapping, applying the bacterium "Bacillus thuringiensis", and spraying with kaolin. Such methods are obligatory for organic olives.


title: Olive

text: A fungus, "Cycloconium oleaginum", can infect the trees for several successive seasons, causing great damage to plantations. A species of bacterium, "Pseudomonas savastanoi" pv. "oleae", induces tumour growth in the shoots. Certain lepidopterous caterpillars feed on the leaves and flowers. "Xylella fastidiosa" bacteria, which can also infect citrus fruit and vines, has attacked olive trees in Apulia, southern Italy, causing olive quick decline syndrome (OQDS). The main vector is "Philaenus spumarius" (meadow spittlebug).


title: Olive

text: A pest which spreads through olive trees is the black scale bug, a small black scale insect that resembles a small black spot. They attach themselves firmly to olive trees and reduce the quality of the fruit; their main predators are wasps. The curculio beetle eats the edges of leaves, leaving sawtooth damage.


title: Olive

text: Rabbits eat the bark of olive trees and can do considerable damage, especially to young trees. If the bark is removed around the entire circumference of a tree, it is likely to die. Voles and mice also do damage by eating the roots of olives. At the northern edge of their cultivation zone, for instance in northern Italy, or southern France and Switzerland, olive trees suffer occasionally from frost. Gales and long-continued rains during the gathering season also cause damage.


title: Olive

text: Since its first domestication, "O. europaea" has been spreading back to the wild from planted groves. Its original wild populations in southern Europe have been largely swamped by feral plants.


title: Olive

text: In some other parts of the world where it has been introduced, most notably South Australia, the olive has become a major woody weed that displaces native vegetation. In South Australia, its seeds are spread by the introduced red fox and by many bird species, including the European starling and the native emu, into woodlands, where they germinate and eventually form a dense canopy that prevents regeneration of native trees. As the climate of South Australia is very dry and bushfire prone, the oil-rich feral olive tree substantially increases the fire hazard of native sclerophyll woodlands.


title: Olive

text: Olives are harvested in the autumn and winter. More specifically in the Northern Hemisphere, green olives are picked from the end of September to about the middle of November. Blond olives are picked from the middle of October to the end of November, and black olives are collected from the middle of November to the end of January or early February. In southern Europe, harvesting is done for several weeks in winter, but the time varies in each country, and with the season and the cultivar.


title: Olive

text: Most olives today are harvested by shaking the boughs or the whole tree. Using olives found lying on the ground can result in poor quality oil, due to damage. Another method involves standing on a ladder and "milking" the olives into a sack tied around the harvester's waist. This method produces high quality oil. A third method uses a device called an oli-net that wraps around the tree trunk and opens to form an umbrella-like catcher from which workers collect the fruit. Another method uses an electric tool, the beater ("abbacchiatore" in Italian), that has large tongs that spin around quickly, removing fruit from the tree. Olives harvested by this method are used for oil.


title: Olive

text: Table olive varieties are more difficult to harvest, as workers must take care not to damage the fruit; baskets that hang around the worker's neck are used. In some places in Italy, Croatia, and Greece, olives are harvested by hand because the terrain is too mountainous for machines. As a result, the fruit is not bruised, which leads to a superior finished product. The method also involves sawing off branches, which is healthy for future production.


title: Olive

text: The amount of oil contained in the fruit differs greatly by cultivar; the pericarp is usually 60–70% oil. Typical yields are of oil per tree per year.


title: Olive

text: Olives are one of the most extensively cultivated fruit crops in the world. In 2011, about were planted with olive trees, which is more than twice the amount of land devoted to apples, bananas, or mangoes. Only coconut trees and oil palms command more space. Cultivation area tripled from between 1960 and 1998 and reached a peak of in 2008. The 10 most-producing countries, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, are all located in the Mediterranean region and produce 95% of the world's olives.


title: Olive

text: One hundred grams of cured green olives provide 146 calories, are a rich source of vitamin E (25% of the Daily Value, DV), and contain a large amount of sodium (104% DV); other nutrients are insignificant. Green olives are 75% water, 15% fat, 4% carbohydrates and 1% protein (table).


title: Olive

text: The polyphenol composition of olive fruits varies during fruit ripening and during processing by fermentation when olives are immersed whole in brine or crushed to produce oil. In raw fruit, total polyphenol contents, as measured by the Folin method, are 117 mg/100 g in black olives and 161 mg/100 g in green olives, compared to 55 and 21 mg/100 g for extra virgin and virgin olive oil, respectively. Olive fruit contains several types of polyphenols, mainly tyrosols, phenolic acids, flavonols and flavones, and for black olives, anthocyanins. The main bitter flavor of olives before curing results from oleuropein and its aglycone which total in content, respectively, 72 and 82 mg/100 g in black olives, and 56 and 59 mg/100 g in green olives.


title: Olive

text: During the crushing, kneading and extraction of olive fruit to obtain olive oil, oleuropein, demethyloleuropein and ligstroside are hydrolyzed by endogenous beta-glucosidases to form aldehydes, dialdehydes, and aldehydic aglycones. Polyphenol content also varies with olive cultivar and the manner of presentation, with plain olives having higher contents than those that are pitted or stuffed.


title: Olive

text: Olive tree pollen is extremely allergenic, with an OPALS allergy scale rating of 10 out of 10. "Olea europaea" is primarily wind-pollinated and its light, buoyant pollen is a strong trigger for asthma. One popular variety, "Swan Hill", is widely sold as an "allergy-free" olive tree; however, this variety does bloom and produce allergenic pollen.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include "Ripostes" (1912), "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, "The Cantos" (c. 1917–1962).


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's "Ulysses". Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury". He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers and mongers, and Jews, among others, as causes, abettors and prolongers of the world war, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.


title: Ezra Pound

text: While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of "The Cantos", which were published as "The Pisan Cantos" (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have ensured that his life and work remain controversial.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948), who married in 1884. Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office. Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Both sides of Pound's family emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis, married Thaddeus Coleman Pound. On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the "Lion" in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the Connecticut constitution. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's maternal grandparents. After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old. Her husband followed and found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote. Pound's education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893. Known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894. His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the "Jenkintown Times-Chronicle" ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot. The following year he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In 1901 Pound was admitted, aged 15, to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts. Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy. His one distinction in first year was in geometry, but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature. In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects". He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.


title: Ezra Pound

text: His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades. Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake. Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits. He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including "Beowulf" and "The Seafarer".


title: Ezra Pound

text: After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle, then at Bryn Mawr College, and hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it "Hilda's Book". (Doolittle became a poet herself, renamed H.D. by Pound.) After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist. After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906. His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the "Book News Monthly" that September. He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke. In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed. Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.


title: Ezra Pound

text: From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College, a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which he called "the sixth circle of hell". One former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent".


title: Ezra Pound

text: He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president's office. He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room. Shocked at having been fired, he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on the RMS "Slavonia".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain. After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge. In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page "A Lume Spento" ("With Tapers Quenched"), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908. The title is from the third canto of Dante's "Purgatorio", alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In "Canto LXXVI" of "The Pisan Cantos", he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning the book and poetry altogether: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours".


title: Ezra Pound

text: In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of "A Lume Spento". English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906. He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board and lodging), but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in "Canto LXXX" ("The Pisan Cantos"), "concerning the landlady's "doings" / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display "A Lume Spento", and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Pound reviewed it himself in the "Evening Standard": "The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it." The following month he self-published a second collection, "A Quinzaine for this Yule". It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews had another 100 copies printed. In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street, where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in 1910. "There were mysterious figures / that emerged from recondite recesses / and ate at the WIENER CAFÉ". Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":


title: Ezra Pound

text: He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."


title: Ezra Pound

text: At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in 1914. The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin". "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Maurice Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint. Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy of "A Lume Spento", and Yeats had apparently found it "charming". Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him, and he was mentioned in "Punch" magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".


title: Ezra Pound

text: In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published "Personae of Ezra Pound" (half the poems were from "A Lume Spento") and in October a further 27 poems (16 new) as "Exultations". Edward Thomas described "Personae" in "English Review" as "full of human passion and natural magic". Rupert Brooke complained in the "Cambridge Review" that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them". But he did acknowledge that Pound had "great talents".


title: Ezra Pound

text: In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914. He visited a friend, Walter Rummel, in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they had only just met, she offered to become a patron to the tune of $1,000 a year, and from then until her death in 1912 she apparently sent him money regularly.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, "The Spirit of Romance", based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic. "Patria Mia", his essays on the United States, were written at this time. In August he moved to New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Avenue South, facing Gramercy Square. Although he loved New York, he felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe who were displacing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he found especially offensive. It was during this period that his antisemitism became apparent; he referred in "Patria Mia" to the "detestable qualities" of Jews. After persuading his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. "Mauretania" on 22 February 1911. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited the U.S. again.


title: Ezra Pound

text: After three days in London he went to Paris, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, "Canzoni" (1911), panned by the "Westminster Gazette" as "affectation combined with pedantry". He wrote in Ford Madox Ford's obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its "stilted language". When he returned to London in August, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Place, then shared a house at 39 Addison Road North, W11. By November A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal the "New Age," had hired him to write a weekly column. Orage appears in "The Cantos" (Possum is T. S. Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound contributed to the "New Age" from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921, attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane. There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett, Cecil Chesterton, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, T. E. Hulme, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells. In the "New Age" office in 1918, he also met C. H. Douglas, a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit, which Pound found attractive. Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were a problem and needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the "dominating race". According to Colin Holmes, the "New Age" itself published antisemitic material. It was within this environment, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury". "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, "Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, Doolittle stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.


title: Ezra Pound

text: At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints. The visitors' book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as the Print Room) on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art. Pound was working at the time on the poems that became "Ripostes" (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work. "I hadn't in 1910 made a language," he wrote years later. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."


title: Ezra Pound

text: In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse", a new magazine in Chicago. The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems, "To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published "Ripostes of Ezra Pound", a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of the 8th-century Old English poem "The Seafarer", that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language. In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by T. E. Hulme.


title: Ezra Pound

text: "Ripostes" includes the first mention of "Les Imagistes": "As for the future, "Les Imagistes", the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping." While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath; he described this later as the founding of a movement in poetry, "Imagisme". In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles:


title: Ezra Pound

text: 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.


title: Ezra Pound

text: "Poetry" published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the "adequate" symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions". He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.


title: Ezra Pound

text: An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro", published in "Poetry" in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde," he wrote in "How I began" in "T. P.'s Weekly" on 6 June 1913, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. ... I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In the summer of 1913 Pound became literary editor of "The Egoist", a journal founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden. At the suggestion of W. B. Yeats, Pound encouraged James Joyce in December of that year to submit his work. The previous month Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce's "Chamber Music" and his "I hear an Army Charging Upon the Land". This was the first of three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914. "Canto LXXXIII" records a visit: "so that I recalled the noise in the chimney / as it were the wind in the chimney / but was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing / that had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye."


title: Ezra Pound

text: In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission to use "I hear an Army" and enclosed "Dubliners" and the first chapter of his novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Pound wrote to Joyce that the novel was "damn fine stuff". Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for "The Egoist", which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite the printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about prostitutes. On the basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected "Dubliners" reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Around this time, Pound's articles in the "New Age" began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage. Samuel Putnam knew Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view. His attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris. English women, with their "preponderantly derivative" minds, were inferior to American women who had minds of their own, he wrote in the "New Age". The English sense of what was right was based on respect for property, not morality. "[P]erched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire", London had lost its energy. England's best authors—Conrad, Hudson, James, and Yeats—were not English. English writers and critics were ignorant, he wrote in 1913.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April 1914 at St Mary Abbots in Kensington, the Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in church had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £150 from her family, and Ezra's was £200. Her father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in 1911, which showed that his main source of income was his father. After the wedding the couple moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, next door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington. This arrangement did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Ezra looking for a place to live outside the apartment building the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra had moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing, a habit that upset her, in part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles away to Hampstead.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The appearance of "Des Imagistes, An Anthology" (1914), edited by Pound, "confirmed the importance" of "Imagisme", according to Ira Nadel. Published in the American magazine "The Glebe" in February 1914 and the following month as a book, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only one to contain work by Pound. It included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by H. D., followed by F. S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by Pound, then Ford Madox Hueffer (as he was known as the time), Allen Upward and John Cournos.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Shortly after its publication, an advertisement for Wyndham Lewis's new magazine, "Blast" promised it would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art"; in the end, "Blast" was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. Pound extended "Imagisme" to art, naming it Vorticism. In June 1914 "The Times" announced Lewis's new Rebel Arts Centre for Vorticist art at 38 Great Ormond Street.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The New England poet Amy Lowell, who was to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, was apparently unhappy that only one of her poems had appeared in "Des Imagistes". She arrived in London in July 1914 to attend two dinners at the Dieudonné restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the publication of "Blast" and the second, on 17 July, the publication of "Des Imagistes". At the second, Ford Madox Hueffer announced that he had been an Imagiste long before Lowell and Pound, and that he doubted their qualifications; only Aldington and H.D. could lay claim to the title, in his view. During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it as a symbol of what he called "Les Nagistes", a school created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends with "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!" Apparently his behavior helped Lowell win people over to her point of view, as did her offer to fund future work.


title: Ezra Pound

text: H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding of "Imagisme" anyway, as he aligned himself with Lewis's ideas. Lowell agreed to finance an annual anthology of "Imagiste" poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule. Upset at Lowell, Pound began to call "Imagisme" "Amygism"; he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves "Imagistes". Not accepting that it was Pound's invention, they refused and Anglicized the term.


title: Ezra Pound

text: When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for writers were immediately reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic. Pound's income from October 1914 to October 1915 was £42.10.0, apparently five times less than the year before.


title: Ezra Pound

text: On 22 September 1914 T. S. Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken, to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of "Poetry", on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was at Oxford on a fellowship from Harvard—had "sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American ... He has actually trained himself "and" modernized himself "on his own"." Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to Humphrey Carpenter, but she published it anyway, in June 1915.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's "Cathay", published in April 1915, contains 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry that Pound translated into English based on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa's widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa, had given Pound her husband's notes in 1913, after Laurence Binyon introduced them. Michael Alexander saw "Cathay" as the most attractive of Pound's work. There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions to Imagism and the modernization of English poetry. English professor Steven Yao argued that "Cathay" shows that translation does not need a thorough knowledge of the source language.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's translations from Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge. Robert Graves wrote in 1955: "[Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated "The Seafarer". I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published "Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir" (1916), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist has gone." Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had written to Pound to say that he kept "Cathay" in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows".


title: Ezra Pound

text: After the publication of "Cathay", Pound mentioned that he was working on a long poem. He described it in September 1915 as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore". In February 1916, when Pound was 30, the poet Carl Sandburg paid tribute to him in "Poetry" magazine. Pound "stains darkly and touches softly", he wrote:


title: Ezra Pound

text: All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned. ...In the cool and purple meantime, Pound goes ahead producing new poems having the slogan, "Guts and Efficiency," emblazoned above his daily program of work. His genius runs to various schools and styles. He acquires traits and then throws them away. One characteristic is that he has no characteristics. He is a new roamer of the beautiful, a new fetcher of wild shapes, in each new handful of writings offered us.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In June, July and August 1917 Pound had the first three cantos published, as "Three Cantos", in "Poetry". He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for the "New Age" as William Atheling and art reviews as B. H. Dias. In May 1917 Margaret Anderson hired him as foreign editor of the "Little Review". He also wrote weekly pieces for "The Egoist" and the "Little Review"; many of the latter complained about provincialism, which included the ringing of church bells. (When Pound lived near St Mary Abbots church in Kensington, he had "engaged in a fierce, guerrilla warfare of letters" about the bells with the vicar, Reverend R. E. Pennefather, according to Richard Aldington.) The volume of writing exhausted him. In 1918, after a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish flu, he decided to stop writing for the "Little Review". He had asked the publisher for a raise to hire a typist, the 23-year-old Iseult Gonne, causing rumors that they were having an affair, but he was turned down.


title: Ezra Pound

text: A suspicion arose in June 1918 that Pound himself had written an article in "The Egoist" praising his own work, and it was clear from the response that he had acquired enemies. The poet F. S. Flint told "The Egoist" editor that "we are all tired of Mr. Pound". British literary circles were "tired of his antics" and of him "puffing and swelling himself and his friends", Flint wrote. "His work has deteriorated from book to book; his manners have become more and more offensive; and we wish he would go back to America."


title: Ezra Pound

text: The March 1919 issue of "Poetry" published Pound's "Poems from the Propertius Series", which appeared to be a translation of the Latin poet Sextus Propertius. Harriet Monroe, editor of "Poetry", published a letter in April 1919 from a professor of Latin, W. G. Hale, who found "about three-score errors" in the text; he said Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", that "much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible", and that "If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide" (adding "I do not counsel this"). Pound replied to Monroe: "Cat-piss and porcupines!! The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation." His letter ended "In final commiseration". Monroe interpreted his silence after that as his resignation from "Poetry" magazine.


title: Ezra Pound

text: By 1919 Pound felt there was no reason to stay in England. He had become "violently hostile" to England, according to Richard Aldington, feeling he was being "frozen out of everything" except the "New Age", and concluding that the British were insensitive to "mental agility in any and every form". He had "muffed his chances of becoming literary director of London—to which he undoubtedly aspired," Aldington wrote in 1941, "by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Published by John Rodker's The Ovid Press in June 1920, Pound's poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" marked his farewell to London, and by December the Pounds were subletting their apartment and preparing to move to France. Consisting of 18 short parts, "Mauberley" describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless. It begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary scene before turning to social criticism, economics, and the war. Here the word "usury" first appears in his work. Just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, Pound denied he was Mauberley. In 1932 the critic F. R. Leavis, then director of studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, called "Mauberley" "great poetry, at once traditional and original. Mr. Pound's standing as a poet rests on it, and rests securely".


title: Ezra Pound

text: On 13 January 1921 Orage wrote in the "New Age": "Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. ... [He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ..."


title: Ezra Pound

text: With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The Pounds settled in Paris around April 1921 and in December moved to an inexpensive ground-floor apartment at 70 "bis" . Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting. He was introduced to the American writer Gertrude Stein, who was living in Paris. She wrote years later that she liked him but did not find him amusing; he was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's collection "Poems 1918–1921" was published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1921. In December that year Ernest Hemingway, then aged 22, moved to Paris with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. In February 1922 the Hemingways visited the Pounds for tea. Although Pound was 14 years older, the men became friends; Hemingway assumed the status of pupil and asked Pound to edit his short stories. Pound introduced him to his contacts, including Lewis, Ford, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box. Unlike Hemingway, Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend his time in salons or building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Eliot sent Pound the manuscript of "The Waste Land" in 1922. Pound edited it with comments like "make up yr. mind", and reduced it by about half. Eliot wrote in 1946: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius." His dedication in "The Waste Land" was "For Ezra Pound / "il miglior fabbro"" (the "better craftsman"), from Canto 26 of Dante's "Purgatorio".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the summer of 1922. They were introduced at a salon hosted by the American heiress Natalie Barney at her 300-year-old house at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The two moved in different social circles: Rudge was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while Pound's friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Twice the length of "Paradise Lost" and 50 times longer than "The Waste Land", Pound's 800-page "The Cantos" ("Canto I" to "Canto CXVI", c. 1917–1962) became his life's work. His obituary in "The Times" described it as not a great poem, because of the lack of structure, but a great improvisation: "[T]he exasperating form permits the occasional, and in the early "Cantos" and in "The Pisan Cantos" not so occasional, irruption of passages of great poetry, hot and burning lava breaking through the cracks in piles of boring scree."


title: Ezra Pound

text: The first three cantos had been published in "Poetry" magazine in June, July, and August 1917, but in 1922 Pound abandoned most of his work and began again. The early cantos, the "Ur-Cantos", became "Canto I" of the new work. In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927, Pound said "The Cantos" was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial, and "[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue":


title: Ezra Pound

text: Alluding to American, European and Oriental art, history and literature, the work is also autobiographical. In the view of Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell, it is a great religious poem, describing humanity's journey from hell to paradise, a "revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe ... the kind of intelligence that makes the cherrystone become a cherry tree." The poet Allen Tate argued in 1949 that it is "about nothing at all ... a voice but no subject". Responding to "A Draft of XXX Cantos" (1930), F. R. Leavis criticized its "lack of form, grammar, principle and direction". The lack of form became a common criticism. Pound wrote in the final complete canto, "Canto CXVI" (116, first published in the "Paris Review" in 1962), that he could not "make it cohere", although a few lines later, referring to the universe: "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere." According to Pound scholar Walter Baumann, the demigod of "Canto CXVI"—"And I am not a demigod"—is Heracles of Sophocles' "Women of Trachis" (450–425 BCE), who exclaims before he dies (based on Pound's translation): "SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES". "Canto CXVI" ends with the lines "a little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour."


title: Ezra Pound

text: The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor. At one dinner in the Place de l'Odéon, a Surrealist guest high on drugs had tried to stab Pound in the back; Robert McAlmon had wrestled with the attacker, and the guests had managed to leave before the police arrived. For Pound the event underlined that their time in France was over. They decided to move to a quieter place, leaving in October 1924 for the seaside town of Rapallo in northern Italy. Hemingway wrote in a letter that Pound had "indulged in a small nervous breakdown" during the packing, leading to two days at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly. During this period the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pregnant by Pound, Olga Rudge followed the couple to Italy, and in July 1925 she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, in a hospital in Brixen. Rudge and Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in Gais, South Tyrol, whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month. Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women. According to Hadley Richardson, he took her aside before she and Hemingway left Paris for Toronto to have their child, telling her: "Well, I might as well say goodbye to you here and now because [the baby] is going to change you completely."


title: Ezra Pound

text: At the end of December 1925 Dorothy went on holiday to Egypt, returning on 1 March, and in May the Pounds and Olga Rudge left Rapallo for Paris to attend a semi-private concert performance at the Salle Pleyel of "Le Testament de Villon", a one-act opera Pound had composed ("nearly tuneless", according to Carpenter) with the musicians Agnes Bedford and George Antheil. Pound had hired two singers for the performance; Rudge was on violin, Pound played percussion, and Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway were in the audience.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The couple stayed on in Paris after the performance; Dorothy was pregnant and wanted the baby to be born at the American hospital. Hemingway accompanied her there in a taxi for the birth of a son, Omar Pound, on 10 September 1926. (Ezra was an admirer of Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam.) Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at Neuilly town hall and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well." He ended up in the American hospital himself for tests and, he told Olga, a "small operation". Dorothy took Omar to England, where she stayed for a year and thereafter visited him every summer. He was sent to live at first in Felpham, Sussex, with a former superintendent of Norland College, which trains nannies, and later became a boarder at Charterhouse. When Dorothy was in England with Omar during the summers, Ezra would spend the time with Olga. Olga's father helped her buy a house in Venice in 1928, and from 1930 she also rented the top floor of a house in Sant'Ambrogio, Caso 60, near the Pounds in Rapallo.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In 1925 a new literary magazine, "This Quarter", dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. In Hemingway's contribution, "Homage to Ezra", he wrote that Pound "devotes perhaps one fifth of his working time to writing poetry and in this twenty per cent of effort writes a large and distinguished share of the really great poetry that has been written by any American living or dead—or any Englishman living or dead or any Irishman who ever wrote English."


title: Ezra Pound

text: With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. 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 and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Against Hemingway's positive view of Pound, Richard Aldington told Amy Lowell that year that Pound had been almost forgotten in England: "as the rest of us go up, he goes down", he wrote. In the U.S., Pound won the $2,000 "Dial" poetry award in 1927 for his translation of the Confucian classic "Great Learning". Using the prize money, he launched his own literary magazine, "The Exile", in March, but only four issues appeared. It did well in the first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Robert McAlmon. Some of the poorest work consisted of Pound's rambling editorials on Confucianism or in praise of Lenin, according to biographer J. J. Wilhelm. His parents visited him in Rapallo that year, seeing him for the first time since 1914. His father had retired, so they moved to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's antisemitism can be traced to at least 1910, when he wrote in "Patria Mia", his essays for the "New Age": "The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions." The sentence was removed from the 1950 edition. In 1922 he apparently disliked that so many Jews were contributing to "The Dial", and in 1939, when he read his poetry at Harvard, he was said to have included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews in the audience.


title: Ezra Pound

text: A friend of Pound's, the writer Lina Caico, wrote to him in March 1937 asking him to use his musical contacts to help a German-Jewish pianist in Berlin who did not have enough money to live on because of the Nuremberg Laws. Normally willing to help fellow artists, Pound replied (at length): "You hit a nice sore spot ... Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England." He nevertheless denied being an antisemite; he said he liked Spinoza, Montaigne, and Alexander del Mar. "What I am driving at", he wrote to Jackson Mac Low, "is that some kike might manage to pin an antisem label on me IF he neglected the mass of my writing."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound came to believe that World War I had been caused by finance capitalism, which he called "usury", and that the Jews had been to blame. He believed the solution lay in C. H. Douglas's idea of social credit. Pound several times used the term "Leihkapital" (loan capital), equating it with Jews. Hitler had used the same term in "Mein Kampf" (1926). "Your enemy is Das Leihkapital," Pound wrote in a 1942 radio script aimed at the UK, "international, wandering Loan Capital. Your enemy is not Germany, your enemy is money on loan. And it would be better to be infected with typhus ... than to be infected with this blindness which prevents you from understanding HOW you are undermined ... The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet." The argument ran that without "usury" and Jews, there would be no class conflict.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In addition to presenting his economic ideas in hundreds of articles and in "The Cantos", Pound wrote over 1,000 letters a year throughout the 1930s. From 1932 he wrote 180 articles for "The New English Weekly", a social-credit journal founded by A. R. Orage, and 60 for "Il Mare", a Rapallo newspaper. He wrote to Bill Bird that the press in Paris was controlled by the Comité des forges. He also came under the influence of Charles Maurras, who led the far-right "Action Française". From around 1932 he began using a dating system that counted Benito Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922 as year zero.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In December 1932 Pound requested a meeting with Mussolini after being hired to work on a film script about Italian fascism. Pound had asked to see Mussolini previously—Olga Rudge had played privately for Mussolini on 19 February 1927—but this time he was given an audience. They met on 30 January 1933 at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.


title: Ezra Pound

text: When Pound handed Mussolini a copy of "A Draft of XXX Cantos", Mussolini reportedly said of a passage Pound highlighted that it was not English. Pound said: "No, it's my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English", to which Mussolini replied "How entertaining" ("divertente"). Pound tried to discuss an 18-point draft of his economic theories. (Daniel Swift writes that this story has been "told and retold, and in each version, the details shift".) Pound recorded the meeting in "Canto XLI". "XI of our era"—1933, 11 years after the March on Rome—is an example of his new dating system.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound wrote to C. H. Douglas that he had "never met anyone who seemed to "get" my ideas so quickly as the boss". The meeting left him feeling that he had become a person of influence, Redman writes, someone who had been consulted by a head of state. When he returned to Rapallo, he was greeted at the station by the town band.