William Brooke Smith

William Brooke Smith (died 1908) was an American painter and friend of Ezra Pound. His death from tuberculosis greatly affected Pound, who dedicated his first poetry collection, A Lume Spento, to Smith.

William Brooke Smith was living in Philadelphia by 1901. In a 1921 letter to William Carlos Williams, Smith's friend Ezra Pound wrote "How in Christ's name he came to be in Phila.—and to know what he did at age 17–25—I don't know." Pound's friend Hilda Doolittle recalled that Smith was "tall, graceful, with a 'butterfly bow' tie", and that a letter he had sent Pound was "poetic, effusive, written, it appeared, with a careful spacing of lines and unextravagant margin".

Smith met Pound, then a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1901 or 1902, when the latter was aged sixteen. The two became friends, in one of Pound's first true friendships. As Smith was an avid reader, he introduced Pound to the works of English decadents such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley; this included gifting Pound a copy of Wilde's Salome. Smith's sister had given him a copy of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat, containing works by Sufi writer Omar Khayyam. As such, Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz suggests that the two may have discussed "Soufi and Mystics, wine, beauty, Pantheism, and painting".

From 1902 to 1905 Smith studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, living on Diamond Street. Pound would sometimes attend classes with him. After graduation, Smith and Pound kept in touch. One letter from Smith, from 1907, was posted from a home on Franklin Street.

...
Wikipedia