This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.
Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.
Volume I of a major new two-part biography. Contentious, colourful, revolutionary, here is the young Pound - a determined and energetic genius setting out to make his way both as a poet and as a force for civilization in England and America. Covering the years up to 1920, David Moody explores Pound's alliances with Yeats, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis, the birth of Vorticism, and his poetry up to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the first Cantos.
‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.
Sons of Ezra: British Poets and Ezra Pound is about the impact of Ezra Pound upon British poets writing today. It is the story of a presence, then of a voice and latterly of an idea. When Pound left London in 1920 after a stay of 12 years, his early ascendancy had waned, and during the 1930s his voice sounded more remotely in British ears. The first poet represented here, Edwin Morgan, began to read Pound towards the end of that decade. Pound's subsequent political reputation has meant that students now coming to university, born after his death in 1972, have not opened a book of his poems in the way that several who testify here remember doing with pleasure. There was a revival of British interest in Pound with the publication of the Pisan Cantos, and then in the 1960s and early 1970s, but since then there has been little public opportunity for British poets to reflect on Pound. Michael Alexander and James McGonigal invited British poets to whom Pound has meant something to reflect, and to testify. To the older writers he was a presence, but the youngest contributors were born at the time that Pound fell silent about 1960, and to them he is an historical figure, the greatest poetic influence since Wordsworth, whose ambition seems an example to avoid as much as to follow.
Cathay is a compilation of traditional Chinese poems translated into English by poet Ezra Pound. These fifteen poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right.
The long-awaited second volume of A. David Moody's critically acclaimed three-part biography of Ezra Pound weaves together the illuminating story of his life, his achievements as a poet and a composer, and his one-man crusade for economic justice. The years 1921-1939 were the most productive of Pound's career. In 1920s Paris, he was among the leading figures of the avant-garde and, in that ambience, he composed an opera, made original contributions to the theory of harmony, and wrote the first thirty cantos of his great epic. Moody explores this creativity in fascinating detail, examining the environment that allowed for some of Pound's greatest work. This period also brought Pound's politics firmly into view and Moody is able to shed new light on his sympathy for Mussolini's Fascism, his invoking Confucian China as a model of responsible government, and his abiding commitment to the democratic values of the American Constitution. Pound is revealed as a great poet and a flawed idealist caught up in the turmoil of his darkening time and struggling, sometimes blindly and in error and self-contradiction, to be a force for enlightenment.
