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  • Cited by 6
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2007
Online ISBN:
9780511610967

Book 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, first published in 2005, 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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Contents

Guide to further reading
Life
Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character, The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. An extensive and lengthy account of the poet.
Conover, Anne. Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. A biography of the Olga Rudge / Ezra Pound relationship spanning nearly fifty years.
Cornell, Julian. The Trial of Ezra Pound. New York: John Day, 1966. An account by Pound's lawyer of his days in and out of court.
Nadel, Ira B.Ezra Pound, A Literary Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004. A short life centering on Pound the poet and critic.
Stock, Noel. Life of Ezra Pound. 2nd edn. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982. A useful early narrative written with Pound's support.
Torrey, E. Fuller. The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. A spirited account of Pound's life at St. Elizabeths.
Wilhelm, James. The American Roots of Ezra Pound. New York: Garland, 1985. Details of Pound's early American experiences.
Contexts
Barnhisel, Gregory. James Laughlin, New Directions and The Remaking of Ezra Pound. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. An important study of Pound and his publisher.
Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London, The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2004. Pound as a player in London's literary and bohemian life.
Hickman, Miranda. The Geometry of Modernism, The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H. D. and Yeats. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Useful contextualization of Vorticism in the development of modernism, uniting literature and the visual arts, focusing on the idiom and metaphors of geometric forms.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. A fundamental assessment of Pound's work and importance in shaping the modernist tradition. Still the most inventive book on Pound.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage, Pound, Yeats and Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. An important account of the shaping poetic practices of Pound, Yeats and the modernists.
Works
Bacigalupo, Massimo. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. A full discussion of the development of Pound's late work.
Bush, Ronald. The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos. [1976.] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. A solid textual study of the evolution of the poem.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The Italian and English poetic context for Pound's writing.
[Eliot, T. S.]. “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry,” To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. [1917.] New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1965. 162–82. An important early analysis of Pound's writing.
Espey, John. Ezra Pound's Mauberley, A Study in Composition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. A detailed reading of the poem.
Froula, Christine. To Write Paradise: Style and Authority in Pound's Cantos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. An important engagement with Pound's use of error and the question of authority in Pound's long poem.
Gallup, Donald. Ezra Pound: A Bibliography. 2nd ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983. A complete bibliography of Pound's publications, although supplements by diverse hands have appeared since this edition. Essential.
Hutchins, Patricia. Ezra Pound's Kensington. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965. Useful description of Pound's early London life.
Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. [1951.] Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. The first extended reading of Pound's poetry, superseded only by Kenner's The Pound Era (1971) which contextualizes Pound's work in the broad frame of modernism.
Pound, Ezra. Canti postumi. Ed. Bacigalupo, Massimo. Rome: Mondadori, 2002. A dual-language edition of cancelled and revised Cantos.
Pound, EzraThe Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1995. Thirteenth printing which includes Cantos LXXII and LXXIII, the Italian Cantos.
Pound, EzraEarly Writings, Poems and Prose. Ed. Nadel, Ira B. New York: Penguin, 2005. A representative collection of poetry and prose, including Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.”
Pound, EzraEzra Pound Speaking.” Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard, W. Doob. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. The only accessible edition of the radio speeches.
Pound, EzraLiterary Essays. Ed. Eliot, T. S.. [1954.] New York: New Directions, 1968. Essential Pound.
Pound, EzraThe Pisan Cantos. Ed. Sieburth, Richard. New York: New Directions, 2003. The best edited text of this section of the poem. Useful introduction and notes.
Pound, EzraPoems and Translations. Ed. Sieburth, Richard. New York: Library of America, 2003. Most comprehensive one-volume collection of Pound's poetry now available.
Pound, EzraPoetry and Prose, Contributions to Periodicals. 11 vols. Ed. Baechler, Lea A.Litz, Walton and Longenbach, James. New York: Garland, 1991. Facsimiles of Pound's original contributions. Important.
Pound, EzraSelected Prose 1909–1965. Ed. Cookson, William. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. An important collection of Pound's writing with sections on money, poetry and contemporaries. Includes his “Treatise on Harmony.”
Pound, Homer. A Small Boy: The Wisconsin Childhood of Homer L. Pound. Ed. Marsh, Alec. Hailey, ID: Ezra Pound Association, 2003. A revealing document.
Rainey, Lawrence S.Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. The most detailed account yet published of Pound's research and writing the Malatesta Cantos.
Ruthven, K. K.A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. A useful guide to the many poems in Pound's text.
Terrell, Carroll F.A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. An essential source for references and allusions to The Cantos.
Witemeyer, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Forms and Renewal 1908–1920. [1969.] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. An important survey of Pound's early poetic writings.
Yeats, W. B. Letters of William Butler Yeats. Ed. Wade, Alan. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954. A useful guide to the Yeats–Pound association and Yeats' own poetic practice.
Critical reception
Alexander, Michael, and McGonigal, James, eds. Sons of Ezra: British Poets and Ezra Pound. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. A collection on Ezra Pound's influence on modern British poets.
Casillo, Robert. The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. A lengthy analysis of the anti-Semitism and Fascism in Pound's work.
Casillo, RobertEzra Pound, The Critical Heritage. Ed. Homberger, EricLondon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. An important collection of contemporary critical commentary on Pound's works, organized by individual titles.
Casillo, RobertThe Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. ed. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. and Stephen, J. Adams. Westport, CT: Greenwood, Press, 2005. A useful encyclopedia of Pound's terms, texts, ideas and people.
Nadel, Ira B., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fifteen essays that cover the poetry and prose of Pound, including his work as critic, translator, composer, economics writer and editor.
Nadel, Ira B.Paideuma. 1972. A journal founded for scholarship and criticism on Ezra Pound, since 2002 expanded to include American and British modernist poetry. Published by the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine, Orono, Maine.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Pound Ascendant,” Boston Review April–May 2004. www.bostonreview.net/BR29.2/perloff.html. An important recent assessment.
Perloff, Marjorie “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 1–32. A stimulating and important encounter with the Pound tradition challenged by Wallace Stevens.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. An important discussion of the market capital of modernism. See esp. ch. 4, “From the Patron to il Duce: Ezra Pound's Odyssey.”
Redman, Timothy. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. A detailed examination using many original sources for Pound's economic and Fascist beliefs.
Stoicheff, Peter. The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound's Cantos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. An in-depth analysis of Pound's problems with completing The Cantos.

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