Ezra Pound
University

In 1901, at 15 years old, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy. His one distinction in first year was in geometry, but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature. In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects". He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades. Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake. Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits. He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer.

After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who later wrote under the name " H.D. "). She was then a student at Bryn Mawr College, and he hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book. After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega 's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist. After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906. His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book News Monthly that September. He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke. In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed. Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.
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