Ezra Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic and one of the leaders of the early modernist movement. Born in Idaho in 1885, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and went on to teach briefly at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana before traveling overseas and living in London, Paris, and Italy, then returning to the States in 1945. He was charged with treason for activities during the war, yet was found mentally ill and spent 13 years in St. Elizabeths Hospital before released in 1958. Pound went back to Italy that year and died in Venice in 1972.

Margaret Lanier Cravens, 1881-1912, of Madison, Indiana, was a musician and artist who began living in Paris in 1907. A pianist, Cravens studied with people such as Maurice Ravel and Harold Bauer. It was likely Walter Rummel, also a pianist, who introduced her to Ezra Pound. The two had a very close friendship and remained in the same artistic and social circles, and before her suicide she penned letters to both Pound and Rummel. Cravens committed suicide in 1912 by shooting herself through the heart; in 1911 her father had also shot and killed himself, following a string of family members in Cravens' family who had also succumbed to suicide.