As an assessment of the Modernist Period, this book is very superior. As a biography of Ezra Pound, who must be regarded as a major shaping influence on modernist and postmodernist poetry, it is far more lucid, honest and entertaining than its subject. Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson offers the case of a silly and attentive man producing a marvelous study of a great man. Often this is achieved through a fawning and unbearable enthusiasm. John Tytell's biography offers the reverse. A man inferior in every way to an unflattering if balanced biography is revealed in his true and complex lights, with the author's enthusiasm largely reserved for the spellbinding facts.

Ezra Pound was a poseur, a con man, and his life and art, such as they were, are all of a piece. The hollowness that one feels at the center of his poetry corresponds to the hollowness of a life that when it was not busy with poetry, was devoted to ranting about the virtues of authoritarianism, raving about imaginary conspiracies and promoting bigotry. The poetry too is distinguished not so much by occasional brilliance as by fragmentation. It is a series of modern shards that are exploded in all directions. It is a collection of modern ruins. Bit heaves on bit, chunk on chunk. Grammar crumbles under their weight. Sense, not to mention common sense, vanishes. If the excuse given is “newness,” the excuse will not do. Seen in context with Pound's life, in fact, the excuse disappears into the obvious fact that Pound himself seems to have been a series of bits and shards and roles to be played, a collection of empty costumes, of struttings. Fascism and Nazism do not have greater appeal because of their “newness,” after all, any more than genocide becomes more palatable because it is managed with ruthless modern efficiency.

If these comments seem severe, it will perhaps be admitted by any reader of Tytell's book that the facts justify them. Moreover, the issues are momentous for poetry.