Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound, by Donald Davie, poet and critic, despite its slim canvas of 120 pages, is virtually a masterpiece of impressive speculation, a work of unrelenting cerebration. Its central revolutionary thesis transformed our image of Pound from that of a simple, robust iconoclastic revolutionary into a complex figure straddling, often unsuccessfully, two centruries and a multitude of literary traditions...What Davie portrays brilliantly are hitherto unnoticed lines of stress in Pound's complex personaliy, nvisible fractures which lead, in the end to dysfunction and silence. This essay represents a turning point in Pound criticism, a contentionn backed by a consummate and skillful analysis of prosody, that articulates Pound's chief value to poetry as a composer of new rhythms and tones...Pound is here depicted as a master of the art of melopoeia - the music of words. The Cantos are given ample space, yet this is not the volume one may want to consult to delve into the poetry, but a prolegomena to the reading of Pound, and the Cantos, that may in all truth be indispensable. To note also the nervousness displayed when dealing with Pound's politics, yet it is all unapolegetically treated and accorded an ancillery place in the study - as its premise makes warrented. Not to b emissed by any student willing to approach one of Modernism's outstanding poets.