Ezra Pound makes his Penguin Classics debut with this unique selection of his early poems and prose, edited with an introductory essay and notes by Pound expert Ira Nadel. The poetry includes such early masterpieces as “The Seafarer,” “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and the first eight of Pound’s incomparable “Cantos.” The prose includes a series of articles and critical pieces, with essays on Imagism, Vorticism, Joyce, and the well-known “Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” First time in Penguin Classics Includes generous selections of Pound's poetry, as well as an assortment of prose
The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound contains the complete text, the poet's first six books, their title pages in facsimile ( A Lume Spento, 1908; A Quinzaine for This Yule, 1908; Personae, 1909; Exultations, 1909; Canzoni, 1911; Ripostes, 1912), and the long poem Redondillas (1911), for many years available only in a rare limited edition. There are, in addition, twenty-five poems originally published in periodicals but not previously collected, as well as thirty-eight others drawn from miscellaneous manuscripts. Ezra Pound's 1926 collection, entitled Personae after his earlier volume of that name, was his personal choice of all the poems he wished to keep in print other than some translations and his Cantos . It was intended to be the definitive collection of his shorter poems, and so it should remain. Yet even the discarded works of a great poet are of value and interest to students and devotees. Originally, brought out clothbound by New Directions in 1976, the texts were established at the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries of The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They were edited by Michael King under the direction of Louis L. Martz, who wrote the introduction, and Donald Gallup, formerly Curator of American Literature. Included are textual and bibliographic notes as well as indexes of titles and first lines.
Included here are all of Pound's concert reviews and statements; the biweekly columns written under the pen name William Atheling for The New Age in London; articles from other periodicals; the complete text of the 1924 landmark volume Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony; extracts from books and letters, and the poet's additional writings on the subject of music. The pieces are organized chronologically, with illuminating commentary, thorough footnotes, and an index. Three appendixes complete this comprehensive volume; an analysis of Pound's theories of "absolute rhythm" and "Great Bass;" a glossary of important musical personalities mentioned in the text and the composer George Antheil's 1924 appreciation, "Why a Poet Quit the Muses."
Gathers all the poet's art criticism from various sources, as well as his articles explaining the new approach of vortography, the English avantgarde movement.
American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was among the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. As a poet, he founded the Imagist movement (c. 1909–17), which advocated the use of precise, concrete images in a free-verse setting. As an editor, he fostered the careers of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. As a force in the literary world, he championed James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Pound also helped to create a modern movement in poetry in which, in T. S. Eliot's words, "English and American poets collaborated, knew each other's works, and influenced each other." Long an expatriate, Pound's questionable political activities during World War II distracted many from the value of his literary work. Nevertheless, his status as a major American poet has never been in doubt, as this choice collection of fifty-seven early poems amply proves. Here are poems — including a number not found in other anthologies — from Personae (1909), Exultations (1909), Ripostes (1912), and Cathay (1915) as well as selections from his major sequence "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920).
Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, who used the pseudonym H.D., are among the most important American modernist poets. In this comparative study, Jacob Korg examines their intertwined lives, from an early romantic relationship when both writers were in their early twenties, through the ongoing friendship and artistic dialogue that helped shape their work. Drawing on unpublished letters and manuscripts as well as published works, Korg offers a fresh view of two American artists and a wholly unexpected portrait of Pound--examined here, for the first time, through the context of a female modernist.
They had been engaged for a period, and what began as a brief romance developed into a lifetime's friendship and collaboration in poetry. Throughout the reminiscence runs H. D's conviction that her life and Pound's had been irrevocably entwined since those early days when they had walked together in the Pennsylvania woods and he wrote for her verse after William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. Twenty-five of these poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and called "Hilda's Book," are published here for the first time as an epilogue to this important and moving document.
