Pound At Home

The title "Pound at Home" for Dr. James Longenbach's lecture is perfect. The lecture focused on how Ezra Pound found solace and his sense of home, when he was alone and as far away as possible from his native Idaho. Longenbach argues that "home," for Pound, meant being someplace where he was with others of his own kind--Artists interested in putting their life's work to creating another renaissance, a renaissance of the renaissance as Longenbach puts it. Indeed, it seems Pound's lifelong ambition was to rejuvenate western culture, to remember the past but also feel its layers, to embed the past into the texture of the present. All the while, "Pound was stuck in a world that refused to acknowledge the poets power to make the world a better place." Thus, he was at home spreading his renaissance, when he was the most alone. He was never in exile, Pound was at home in Paris, London, Rapallo, even Crawfordsville. He was at home when he was spreading his dream, and if you look at it that way and consider he did that all his life , Pound was the luckiest man alive.