Ezra Pound & John Adams

It's the birthday of the poet and critic Ezra Pound, (books by this author) born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. Pound is famous for championing the Modernist movement, and he did this by celebrating and encouraging other writers like W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. He is most famous for editing T.S. Eliot's huge poem The Waste Land and eventually cutting out half of it.
Ezra Pound said, "Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."


It's the birthday of the second president of the United States, John Adams, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1735. He was a lawyer, a writer, and a philosopher, famous for the articles he wrote in opposition to the British Stamp Act. But even though John Adams supported the American patriot cause, he agreed to defend the British soldiers who killed civilians during the Boston Massacre, and he managed to get most of them acquitted. He did it because the soldiers couldn't find another lawyer and he felt that it was his duty to humanity.
He represented Massachusetts at the Continental Congress. He served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, and even though Thomas Jefferson wrote most of it, John Adams edited it, and he defended it to the rest of the Congress and helped get it passed.
Adams was vice president for George Washington, but he didn't like it much. In 1796, he was elected the second president of the United States. But his party, the Federalist Party, ended up divided, and the next time around he lost to Jefferson. Eventually, the two Founding Fathers made up, and they began a long correspondence, more than 150 letters.
On July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, in two different places.
John Adams said, "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."