Ezra Pound was a seminal American poet and critic; his most famous work is the long, unfinished poem The Cantos. As an expatriate living in London, he was responsible for advancing the careers of important modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce at the start of their careers. He later moved to Italy and became a supporter of Mussolini and Hitler. After World War II, he returned to the US, where he was considered a traitor and spent much of his life in a mental institution.
 

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

– Ezra Pound