Omar Pound

Omar Shakespear Pound (10 September 1926 – 2 March 2010) was an Anglo-American writer, teacher, and translator. The son of Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy Shakespear, Pound was the author of Arabic & Persian Poems and co-author of Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). He also wrote poems of his own and published material about his parents.

Early life and education Omar was born in the American Hospital of Paris, the son of poet Ezra Pound and his wife artist Dorothy Shakespear, who were living in Italy at the time. The couple had been in Paris since May for the concert performance of an opera Ezra had written with two musicians, and had stayed on in Paris because Dorothy wanted the baby to be born at the American Hospital. Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Paris and was a friend of the Pounds, drove her there for the birth. Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at the local town hall in Neuilly and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well." Omar was born 14 months after his half-sister Maria, later known as Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Ezra and his mistress, violinist Olga Rudge.

Dorothy took Omar to London when he was 18 months old, where she stayed for a year, then left him in the care of his maternal grandmother, Olivia Shakespear. He was sent to live in the Norland Institute, which trains nannies and used to look after young children for parents who were overseas. Ezra's parents visited Omar there in 1931. In 1933 he attended a Montessori School, also in Sussex, then a local prep school. When Olivia Shakespear died in 1938, Omar met his father for the first time; Ezra was in London settling Olivia's affairs.

Pound taught at the Roxbury Latin School in Boston; the American School of Tangier, which he headed in 2007, the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology; and from 1980 Princeton University.

Writing Pound is the author of Arabic & Persian Poems (1970) and co-author of Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). He was also a founding trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. His papers and correspondence are kept in the collections of the Hamilton College library.

Personal life Pound married Elizabeth Stevenson Parkin in 1955, and they had two children, Katherine Shakespear Pound and Oriana Davenport Pound. In his biographical entry in Contemporary Authors, Pound listed both his politics and his religion as "nil". He clarified in an interview that he considered himself "fundamentally a mystic", adding "Even saying one doesn't have a religion is an acceptance of the mysteries of life, and I think acceptance of mysteries gives one a sense of wonder." Pound died aged 83 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Selected works

(1970). Arabic & Persian Poems. London: Fulcrum Press. (1970). Kano. Birmingham: Migrant Press. (1978) with Philip Grover. Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography. Folkestone: Dawson. (1985). The Dying Sorcerer: Poems. Antigonish, Nova Scotia: Tarlane Editions. (1984). Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, Their Letters 1908–1914. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. (1984). Siege Lucknow, 1857. Revere, PA: Woolmer/Brotherson. (1987). Pissle and the Holy Grail. Revere, PA: Woolmer/Brotherson. (1988) with Robert Spoo. Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910–1912. Durham: Duke University Press. (1989). Gorby and the Rats. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. (1998). The Countess at the Bar. London: The Strawberry Press. (1999). Poems Inside & Out. Nacogdoches, TX: LaNana Creek Press. (1999) with Robert Spoo. Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2001). Watching the Worlds Go By: Selected Poems. Spring, TX: Panther Creek Press.