The volcano’s resonant rumble

In the cartoonist Martin Rowson’s comic strip critique-cum-spoof of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound appeared in cameo as ‘Idaho Ez’ — a sort of demented janitor shuffling through the middle of the action, muttering to himself and pushing a broom. This captures, albeit cruelly, a version of the way his reputation survives: opaque, marginal, bonkers — his primary importance in 20th-century poetry if not actually janitorial then that of a curator. The other side of his image, of course, is as a comic turn in the lives of his contemporaries, whether as the loony old anti-Semite in St Elizabeth’s or as the attention-seeking young flâneur described fancifully by Ford Madox Ford:

Ezra . . . would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard-cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.