Ezra Pound in context

"Long at the centre of the modernist project, from editing Eliot's The Waste Land to publishing Joyce, Pound has also been a provocateur and instigator of new movements, while initiating a new poetics. This is the first volume to summarize and analyze the multiple contexts of Pound's work, underlining the magnitude of his contribution and drawing on new archival, textual and theoretical studies. Pound's political and economic ideas also receive attention. With its concentration on the contexts of history, sociology, aesthetics and politics, the volume will provide a portrait of Pound's unusually international reach: an American-born, modern poet absorbing the cultures of England, France, Italy and China. These essays situate Pound in the social and material realities of his time and will be invaluable for students and scholars of Pound and modernism"--

"Most of the stuff I write does not pretend to make itself intelligible to anyone who has not done a certain quite large amount of reading.1 Ezra Pound, who published his first poem in 1902 and his last in 1969, understood the necessity of context. The range, volume, and arcane nature of his material, as impressive as it was immense, required background which he expected of his readers. Initially, this meant knowledge of the Provencıal poets, Dante, Confucius, and a healthy dose of Greek and Latin, as well as Chinese and American history. As editor, translator, anthologist, essayist, and poet, he anticipated that his readers would understand as well the sources, allusions, and origins of his work. The complex of materials was part of being modern"--