Ezra Pound: His Metric And Poetry

Description

As the chief poems in "A Lume Spento" were afterwards incorporated in "Personae," the book demands mention only as a date in the author's history. "Personae," the first book published in London, followed early in 1909. Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing; few books of verse have ever owed their success so purely to their own merits. Pound came to London a complete stranger, without either literary patronage or financial means. He took "Personae" to Mr. Elkin Mathews, who has the glory of having published Yeats' "Wind Among the Reeds," and the "Books of the Rhymers' Club," in which many of the poets of the '90s, now famous, found a place.

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Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations (Library of America)

Description

Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature's modernist revolution. From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except The Cantos. In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection Hilda's Book (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 "lost" manuscript.

Pound's influential Cathay (1915), Lustra (1917), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to "make it new," opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, Poems and Translations reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time."

An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.

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The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books)

Description

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is the most important epic poem of the twentieth century.

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them."

Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

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New Selected Poems and Translations (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook)

Description

The essential collection of Ezra Pound’s poetry—newly expanded and annotated with essays by Richard Sieburth, T. S. Eliot, and John Berryman.

This newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems is intended to articulate Pound for the twenty-first century. Gone are many of the “stale creampuffs” (as Pound called them) of the 1949 edition. Instead, new emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of original composition and translation within Pound’s career. New features of this edition include the complete “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in its original lineation, early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine, and the troubadours, as well as late translations of Sophocles, and the Confucian Odes.

As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parceled out his work to a variety of journals in England, America, France, and Italy. This new edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication. We can observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford’s English Review and Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based Poetry, and then as an agent provocateur for the avant-garde Little Review, Blast, and The Dial.

Unlike all previous selections, this volume provides annotation to all the early poems as well as a running commentary on the later Cantos — indispensable to any reader wanting to follow Pound on his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century. The editor, Richard Sieburth, provides a chronology of Pound’s life, a new preface, and an informative afterword, “Selecting Pound.” Also included in the appendix are T. S. Eliot’s and John Berryman’s original introductions to Pound’s Selected Poems.

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The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Description

Ezra Pound is one of the most visible and influential poets of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most complex, his poetry containing historical and mythical allusions, experiments of form and style and often controversial political views. Yet Pound's life and work continue to fascinate. This Introduction is designed to help students reading Pound for the first time. Pound scholar Ira B. Nadel provides a guide to the rich webs of allusion and stylistic borrowings and innovations in Pound's writing. He offers a clear overview of Pound's life, works, contexts and reception history and his multidimensional career as a poet, translator, critic, editor, anthologist and impresario, a career that placed him at the heart of literary modernism. This invaluable and accessible introduction explains the huge contribution Pound made to the development of modernism in the early twentieth century.

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Ezra Pound: The Cantos (Landmarks of World Literature)

Description

Pound's 800 page Cantos, written over a period of more than fifty years (1917-1969), invites the reader to join the poet on a journey from darkness and despair towards light and positive activity. In this book, George Kearns addresses the reader approaching The Cantos for the first time. He examines the poem's aesthetic and political-ethical-didactic dimensions and shows that despite its complexity and the many objections which can be raised to its poetics and politics, its study can be greatly rewarding.

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