Ezra Pound - Delphi Poetical Works of Ezra Pound

Pounds very first publication (by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years) was a limerick in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election:

There was a young man from the West,

He did what he could for what he thought best;

But election came round,

He found himself drowned,

And the papers will tell you the rest.

Between 1897 and 1900 Pound attended Cheltenham Military Academy, occasionally as a boarder, where he specialised in Latin and the Classics. He made his first trip abroad in the summer of 1898 when he was 13 years old. It was a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and Frances Weston (Aunt Frank), who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. After attending the academy he may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for a year. In 1901 at the age of 15, he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvanias College of Liberal Arts.

Whilst at the university, he met Hilda Doolittle (later to become the poet known as H.D.), who was the daughter of the professor of astronomy. She followed Pound to Europe in 1908, leaving her family, friends and country behind at great personal risk, to help Pound with developing the Imagism movement in London. In February 1908, Pound asked her father for permission to marry Hilda. Doolittle was a curt man, described as donnish and intimidating. Not impressed by Pounds reputation as a ladies man and his sluggish career start as a poet, often moving from place to place. Doolittles response was dismissive: What! Why youre nothing but a nomad! Pound asked Hilda to marry him in the summer of 1907, and though rejected, he wrote several poems for her between 1905 and 1907, twenty-five of which were later hand-bound and arranged in the following unofficial collection, titled Hildas Book.