Ezra Pound S Early Verse And Lyric Tradition

Traces the lyricism and musicality in Pound's early verse through to his radical Modernist style.

Traces the lyricism and musicality in Pound's early verse through to his radical Modernist style. Robert Stark argues that Pound learned how to write poetry more or less as if it was a foreign tongue, a poetic 'jargon' with a unique lexicon, grammar, and even morphology. Stark contextualizes Pound's poetic craft by examining his relationship to the Mediaeval and Classical originators of the methods he employs and by considering the practice and criticism of his immediate Victorian and Romantic predecessors. He explores the influence of poets such as François Villon, Guido Cavalcanti, Robert Burns, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walt Whitman on Pound's lyrical style. For Stark, Pound's poly-vocalism arises out of his interest in dialect and, above all, in the the acoustic qualities of language.

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He came to Europe in 1908 and settled in London, where he became a central figure in the literary and artistic world, befriended by Yeats and a supporter of Eliot and Joyce, among others. In 1920 he moved to Paris, and later to Rapallo in Italy. During the Second World War he made a series of propagandist broadcasts over Radio Rome, for which he was later tried in the United States and subsequently committed to a hospital for the insane. After thirteen years, he was released and returned to Italy; dying in Venice in 1972.

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.

Ezra Pound has been called "the inventor of modern poetry in English." The verse and criticism which he produced during the early years of the twentieth century very largely determined the directions of creative writing in our time; virtually every major poet in England and America today has acknowledged his help or influence. Pound's lyric genius, his superb technique, and his fresh insight into literary problems make him one of the small company of men who through the centuries have kept poetry alive—one of the great innovators. This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works—the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem.

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

Known for his maxim "Make it new," Ezra Pound played a principal role in shaping the modernist movement as a poet, translator, and literary critic. His works, with their complex structures and layered allusions, remain widely taught. Yet his known fascism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny raise issues about dangerous ideologies that influenced his work and that must be addressed in the classroom. The first section, "Materials," catalogs the print and digital editions of Pound's works, evaluates numerous secondary sources, and provides a history of Pound's critical contexts. The essays in the second section, "Approaches," offer strategies for guiding students toward a clearer understanding of Pound's difficult works and the context in which they were written.