Ezra Pound Selected Poems Introduction by T.S. Eliot Faber paper covered Editions

by Ezra Pound

First edition/printing

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literature, American, The United States Of America, 20th Century

Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life can give you unexpected gifts sometimes, such as this delicious selection of Ezra Pound's poems, which shed some light into a rather somber day.
I was delighted to discover a completely unknown Ezra Pound to me in his early poems. He, who was mostly famous for having founded the school of Imagism (where poets wrote succinct verses of dry clarity and exact visual images), started writing quite longish troubadoresque poems about the Middle Ages, something that came as a surprise. His voice, openly masculine, combines the "man of action" with the passionate lover:

"I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name
In ordinary places.
I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind,
And that the world should dry as a dead leaf,
Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,
So that I might find you again,
Alone."

Similarly foreign were his most critical but eloquent stanzas regarding the abuse of political power and the horrific slaughter of English and American youths in WWI, which can be clearly seen in poems like "Hugh Selwin Mauberly":

"These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case...
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor"..."

But still, the Pound that initially captured my heart, managed to shine even stronger with his Imagistic radical condensation. I was astounded once again with his ability to capture an instant in just a few words, taking out everything which was redundant, making of concentration the very essence of poetry and exploring the way reality can be rendered into words:

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough "

Isn't it amazing that an image as the one above could include narrative? I can't help but imagine a grey and uniform mass of people with some colorful faces that strike me for some reason and stand out from that multitude. Almost a photograph. And a tale. Subtly beautiful.

Pound was the Master, the one who broke the rules of lyrical poetry and discovered a new way of expressing without telling much, and in that way, he opened endless worlds of interpretations which have been awakening souls for more than a century. Mine among them.
A Poet of Images, a living metaphor.

[Diamond Cowboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most excelent poet. It was a little difficult to follow, but if you take your time you can figure it out. I highly recommend this book.

[Sawsan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would bathe myself in strangeness
These comforts heaped upon me, smother me
I burn, I scald so for the new,
New friends, new faces, places!
Oh to be out of this,
This that is all I wanted
save the new
And you,
Love, you the much, the more desired
Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,
All mire, mist, all fog,
All ways of traffic?
You, I wold have flow over me like water,
Oh, but far out of this!
Grass, and low fields, and hills, and sun,
Oh, sun enough!
Out, and alone, among some alien people!

[kaelan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read over the span of three years and reviewed along the way...

Poems 1908-1912: 2/5

Pound clearly has a good ear. And already, his idiosyncratic set of influences—the ancient Greeks, the Provençal and Italian troubadours—has started to make itself felt. But most of these poems suffer from a sort of affected archaism, replete with "doths" and "thees" and "-eth" verb endings.

Pound himself would later distance himself from this material:

You were praised, my books,
because I had just come from the country;
I was twenty years behind the times
so you found an audience ready.
I do not disown you,
do not you disown your progeny.

Here they stand without quaint devices,
Here they are with nothing archaic about them.

Although "Sestina: Altaforte," with its close union of form and content, stands out from the rest.

Poems 1913-1915: 3/5

Man, I hadn't realized what a hipster Pound was in his time. Take, for instance, this counter-cultural call-to-arms, which boasts an almost Ginsberg-esque flavour:

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enlsaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

On the whole, I found the 1913-1915 poems substantive yet transitional. Pound is finding his Modernist voice, although the products lack the cut and polish of the Cantos. Indeed, some of these works, such as "The Game of Chess" with its angular imagery, reminded me of modernist cinema or even early constructivist art.

The legendary "In a Station of the Metro" is probably the most memorable of the bunch. But honourable mention must go to the impressionistic "The Garden" and "Papyrus"—the latter being an extraordinarily enigmatic translation of a fragment of Sappho.

Cathay: 4/5

T.S. Eliot quipped that Pound, with these poems, had become "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Such a statement may needle the modern reader. But circa 1915, when Cathay first appeared on bookstore shelves, people bothered themselves little with the ethics of cultural appropriation.

In any event, Eliot made no claims as to Pound's authenticity, nor did (as far as I can tell) Pound himself. (It so happens that Cathay found the poet working off of an American scholar's translations of Japanese translations of the original Chinese.) And as was the case with Pound's earlier forays into Provençal, Italian and Greek literature, his motivations here seem two-fold: namely, a faith in the fundamental universality of human experience (on the one hand) and a legitimate fascination with difference (on the other).

Unsurprisingly, then, these poems contain some obvious gaffs: Pound's oft-mentioned "River Kiang" is tautological ("kiang" means "river"); separate poems are accidentally conflated; authorship is erroneously ascribed. Yet there remains something deeply powerful about these poems, something made all the more poignant by their circuitous provenance. They are like echoes of an echo—pregnant and inscrutable at once.

Poems 1915-1918: 4/5

Isn't it curious how a poem can come across as literally gibberish on the first reading but grow more or less crystal-clear on repeated attempts? Like "L'Aura Amara," which initially struck me as a bona fide sound poem (on one level, it surely is) before revealing itself to be one of the most formally rigorous translations that I've ever had the pleasure to read. "Near Perigord," too, underwent a comparable transformation, from a spattering of obscure Provençal references into an insightful meta-critical essay on the perils of historic-poetic interpretation.

The other poems in this collection are fine enough, but don't quite reach the heights (in this reader's estimation, at least) of those two.

Homage to Sextus Propertius: 3/5

Eliot was perhaps apt in his description of this poem as both "not enough a translation" and "too much a translation." But as "specialist" as a high Modernist rendering of some 2000-year-old elegiac Latin verse might be, I can't help but admire Pound's attempt "to bring a dead man to life."

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: 3/5.

I confess that I didn't "get" these poems. Pound himself described the series as "a farewell to London" and, elsewhere, "an attempt to condense the [Henry] James novel." He would later call Hugh a mask in the vein of Eliot's Prufrock. Through the haze of my confusion, I picked up strains of satire ("Mr. Nixon") and aesthetics ("The Age Demanded"). A rancid whiff of antisemitism as well ("Brennbaum"). But bigotry aside, I look forward to finally delving into the Cantos.

The Cantos: 2/5

What can I say about Pound's sprawling poem cycle—the culmination of his artistry but also the proof (at least as pleaded during his 1950s trial for treason) of his worsening insanity? Undeniably gorgeous at times, especially when read aloud. Almost always impenetrable. Occasionally downright unbearable: the "dull history", the crackpot railings against usury, the presumption of familiarity with the author's own personal, multilingual literary canon...

It's true that Pound's notes and letters, not to mention the several available commentaries, reveal a whole complex of meanings, connections, associations. But the question inevitably raised by these poems is: Is it worth it? There's a power to simplicity, to the sort of depth that lies in the idea rather than the presentation. I'm thinking of your Seamus Heaneys or your William Blakes. The Cantos, by comparison, for all their eruditeness and expansiveness, read more like a code, like some sort of puzzle or game.

I can imagine someone devoting theirself to a single canto, reading and rereading it and yet always uncovering something new: a particular rhythmic pattern or sonority, a startling subject rhyme... I guess I'm just not convinced that the opportunity cost would be worth it.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alphabetical List of Titles

from Personae (1908, 1909, 1910)
--Cino
--Na Audiart
--Villonaud for this Yule
--The Tree
--Sestina: Altaforte
--Ballad of the Goodly Fere
--Planh for the Young English King
--"Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula"
--Erat Hora
--The House of Splendour
--La Fraisne
--A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet
--Marvoil
--Piere Vidal Old

from Ripostes (1912)
--Portrait d'une Femme
--An Object
--The Seafarer
--∆ὡpia
--Apparuit
--The Return

from Lustra
--Tenzone
--The Garret
--The Garden
--Salutation
--Salutation the Second
--The Spring
--Commission
--A Pact
--Dance Figure
--April
--Gentildonna
--The Rest
--Les Millwin
--A Song of the Degrees
--Ité
--The Bath Tub
--Liu Ch'e
--Arides
--Amities
--Meditatio
--Ladies
--Coda
--The Coming of War: Actæon
--In a Station of the Metro
--Alba
--Coitus
--The Encounter
--Ιμέρρw
--"Ione, Dead the Long Year"
--The Tea Shop
--The Lake Isle
--Epitaphs
--Villanelle: the Psychological Hour
--Alba from "Langue d'Oc"
--Near Perigord

Cathay
--Song of the Bowmen of Shu
--The Beautiful Toilet
--The River Song
--The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter
--Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin
--The Jewel Stairs' Grievance
--Lament of the Frontier Guard
--Exile's Letter

--Four Poems of Departure
--Separation on the River Kiang
--Taking Leave of a Friend
--Leave-taking Near Shoku
--The City of Choan

--South-Folk in Cold Country
--Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku
--A Ballad of the Mulberry Road
--Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu
--To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud"

--Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917)

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
--I E. P. Ode Pour L'Election de son Sepulchre
--II "The age demanded an image"
--III "The tea-rose tea-gown, etc."
--IV "These fought in any case,"
--V "There died a myriad,"
--VI Yeux Glauques
--VII "Siena Mi Fe'; Disfecemi Maremma"
--VIII Brennbaum
--IX Mr. Nixon
--X "Beneath the sagging roof"
--XI "Conservatrix of Milésien"
--XII "Daphne with her thighs in bark"
--Envoi (1919)
--Mauberley 1920

--Cantos

[°•.Melina°•. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"همین که ما یک بار به هم رسیدیم کافی‌ست
به شعر درآمدن آن چه سودی دارد؟"

به رسم هرساله‌ی ولنتاین، یه شاعر و کتاب شعر جدید، برای اینکه شبش برات خوباشو جدا کنم و لالایی بگم.
.
《جاده‌های این‌ سرزمین خالی‌اند/ازرا پاوند/نشر افراز》
《ترجمه‌ی مرتضی پاشا پور/ ۱۵۶ صفحه》۳ونیم ستاره.
.
شعر خوندن رو دوست دارم. از واجبات مسیر مطالعه‌ی آدمه...جوریکه به فکر کردن وامیداره آدمو، جوریکه خودت و تجربیاتت رو میذاری جای سطرهایی که شاعر میگه و احساساتی که توصیف میکنه.
شاعر باهوش و خلاقی بود. نمیدونم احسا��م به شعرهای مدرت چیه چون ذاتا آدم کلاسیکی‌ام، اما هیچوقت از خودم دریغشون نکردم چوم یه آرامش خاصی به روحم میبخشن. کتاب چاپ ۹۳ هستش و فکر کنم از اون موقع تاالان تجدید چاپ نشده! شانسی از لابلای قفسه‌های کتابفروشی مال خودم شد.
.
🔖بهمن ۱۴۰۳

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall,
And they talk of Swinburne's women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.
And the harlots of Baudelaire.

- - - -

O thou newcomer who seek'st Rome in Rome
And find'st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman;
Arches worn old and palaces made common
Rome's name alone within these walls keeps home.

Behold how pride and ruin can befall
One who hath set the whole world -neath her laws,
All-conquering, now conquered, because
She is Time's prey, and Time conquereth all.

Rome that art Rome's one sole last monument,
Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town,
Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent,

Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime!
That which stands firm in thee Time batters down,
And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift Time.

- - - -

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title of this collection makes it very tempting to write a one sentence review: "They should have selected better poems." While I do not entirely mean that, after all, which would be the better poems?, I kind of do mean it in that I don't think this collection is very good, nor do I believe that Pound was a very good poet.

I don't blame Pound for four things: being obscure, altering the work of others and presenting it in versions of his own, being so allusive, or including words and phrases from other languages. I blame him for boring me. Now, some of these four things are the reasons many of the poems collected here are bores, but, in fact, T. S. Eliot was obscure and allusive and used words and phrases from other languages. He, heavily edited by Pound, did so brilliantly, so those things are not intrinsic problems. The problem is that Pound uses them badly. To be fair to Pound, two or three of the poems in this selection are just wonderful, but I had to wade through all the sludge to find them.

The irony is that I once had all of Pound's books of poetry, but I simply could not finish any of them. A selected collection, presumably his best work, seemed the way to go. It wasn't the way to go.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lunatic with an edge. I have always enjoyed Ezra Pound's intellect and his poetry, although are not in the Cole Porter type-of-brilliance, he's one of a kind and he's something that only could have been invented in the 20th Century. One doesn't hear his name that much anymore - but what do I know, I hang out at Denny's. But nevertheless Pound is a history trip - and for sure one of those desert island classics - where you can just focused on Pound's sense of language and his odd sensibility. I mean how many poems do you know that deals with economics?

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not setting out the contents as Edward has already done this in his review and we seem to have read the same edition.

Not being either a lingust nor a classicist I could not expect to squeeze the most from this wide ranging selection. But in the main I enjoyed reading the poems.

I like Pound’s economical use of words, his wit and sense of history. The whirlwind changes of scene, often within the same poem, excite, though take some adjusting to. Some of the Cantos lost me, but by no means all. I now must read more about the man and his work.

‘Planh for the Young English King’ is almost Shakespearian in tone, moving and able to convey for me the contemporary mood at the death of Henry II’s eldest son.

‘The Garret’ : gentle wit and perception.

‘…..the rich have butlers and no friends
…..we have friends and no butlers.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova,
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.’

LIU CH’E
‘The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.’

Canto XLV

With Usura : Raw passion and anger from Pound’s pen against the crippling effects of the many headed vice of usury and its effects on lives and cultures.

‘no picture is made to endure or to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura,sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
………………..
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed Adamo me fecit,
……
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
……
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores forEleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

3.5*

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let the gods speak softly of us

Pleasantly surprised by the rich images and ever human humor. Both of those attributes diminish as the collection proceeded through The Cantos. Oh well.

A recommended point of entry.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this because I think Ezra Pound's life story and ideas are really interesting. But was fairly disappointed. There are a lot of things to enjoy in the book. The shorter poems, the ones translated from east-asian poetry, or the ones created in that style. The ones written in fairly ordinary english. Those were good. Some were even excellent. However, there is a LOT in this book which was just totally useless to me. Things which seemed really larpy. Stuff which had ancient greek references thrown in every 2 seconds, which I didn't understand, and I'm not even sure were real references or just gibberish. Just random greek names which had to meaning to me. Some of the east asian poetry has the same issue. And the length of the worst poems is usually MUCH longer.

[Myles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of folks hate Pound for the worst of reasons. They love to throw around authorial fallacies and judge the content of his work by the way he had to live his life. Truth is, he was a selfish, evil man. Still, Pound gets me every time. After Ginsberg, he is THE poet in my book.

The economy of his writing, the way he can express the infinite with what is utterly finite-- it's unparalleled. It is a pleasure piecing together the corroded fragments he leaves in his readers' hands.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I might enjoy Selected Poems by Ezra Pound, until I realized it was full of poems by Ezra Pound, which was both downer and drawback. I yield to no one in my admiration of Pound, except for his writing, which usually is unreadable, and his ideas, which usually are full of shit. Other than that, great stuff. And he did lend a helping hand to Yeats, Frost, and Eliot. There was a generous spirit swimming somewhere in all the bilge.

[Julio Pino · Rating 5 out of 5]

The human poem machine. The dynamo from Idaho. Ezra Pound did not just write poetry. He invented a new way to write poetry. Taking his inspiration from Dante and the medieval troubadors, above all Francois Villon, Pound fused the classic and the modern to "tell the tale of the tribe", nothing less than twentieth century man unanchored from gods, tradition and culture. "In a Station of the Paris Metro", "The apparition of these faces in the crowd/petals on a soft, black bough" is haiku for the age of the silent masses. Hugh Mauberly Selwyn" is Pound himself, mourning his friends lost in the First World War: "There died a myriad, among them the best, for an old bitch got rotten in the teeth, for a botched civilization", and predicting more horrors to come,"the age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace". Pound then launched into composing THE CANTOS, masterfully excerpted here: cursing the modern world of modern money-worship, "They have brought whores, and corpses are set to banquet, at the behest of usura", and finally passing judgment on himself, "a blown husk that is finished, as pale light hovers over marshes". Ezra Pound lived, and wrote, a modern INFERNO.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think a lot of the appreciation of poetry is simply the quasi-moral decision that one is going to put up with a lot of stuff that one doesn't understand in order to get taught something. Of course a poet can't always speak in a way that even the educated reader would immediately appreciate, or else the poetry wouldn't have anything to say.
Pound, of course, pushes this envelope about as far as it will go. Extensive editing and notes still don't help him to be explicable all the time, and yet one is left, after reading him, with a fuller view of the world: that is, if Pound doesn't explain the world to you, at least you know that the world can contain, from time to time, a guy like Pound. As Lewis says of Skelton, "we have met a personality."
It helps to remember, on occasion, that Pound was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and was held in a mental institution for many years. 'Much madness is divinest sense' indeed, but perhaps not all.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat is dit moeilijk te beoordelen. Sommige van de gedichten hebben me volledig weggeblazen, andere zijn zo ontzettend obscuur dat ik ongetwijfeld gigantisch veel mis (looking at you, later Cantos).

Zelfs wanneer de verwijzingen en allusies grotendeels te maken hebben met literatuur en geschiedenis uit de oudheid loop ik als classicus geregeld verloren in Pounds poëzie. Laat staan wanneer hij bijvoorbeeld Chinese karakters gebruikt.

Het klinkt wel altijd bijzonder goed, dat dan weer wel.

[RK Byers · Rating 1 out of 5]

this guy musta been selling opium. there's no way his writing supported him.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
His poetry is compelling, insightful, ingenious and intense, yet at the same time often baffling, disjointed and esoteric.

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems left me with an odd mix of impressions. Some — such as 'In Durance', 'The Garret', 'The Garden', and 'The Rest' — are deplorably self-aggrandising and annoying. Pound, like T.S. Eliot, seems to have believed that he was one of the few poets left who was truly cultured, and this is a bit tiresome. A handful of others are sublime. 'Doria' is a beautiful reflection on love, which Pound associates not with passing things like flowers, but with 'the eternal moods of the bleak wind'. Meanwhile, no poem could make me miss the city more than 'In a Station of the Metro', which took me to an imaginary day in Warren Street station many years ago. Some, like those from Cathay, just don't really speak to me. This is worth reading for those seriously interested in the development of modernism in literature.

[Ben Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A violent eschewal of the abstract in favor of the concrete? Or a jackdaw poetry built of snatches? I can't quite decide.

[Raghul · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous book, lots of nice snippets. This guy would cook some mean lasagna I already know

[miss q · Rating 3 out of 5]

A diverse glimpse into the poet's repertoire; while some pieces shine with Pound's signature brilliance, others leave much to be desired. The selection could have been more thoughtfully curated for a smoother reading experience. Certain poems resonate strongly, showcasing Pound's mastery of language and form. However, there are moments where the collection loses its momentum, leaving the reader wanting more. Despite its shortcomings, it still provides a valuable insight into Pound's multifaceted talent.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is not much I can say about this. In 95% of the poems I had no idea what Pound was talking about. But somehow the poems radiate brilliancy. I wish I could understand or really appreciate them.
Funny, T.S. Elliot says in his introduction that Pound would have been regarded a greater poet had he not also been a translator. And a better translator (from Chinese) had he not been a poet.

[Matthew DeCostanza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ezra Pound is one of those not-so-rare poets that is best to be read with a strategy guide.

I was lucky enough to procure a book on Pound from the 20th Century Views series at around the same time as I purchased this New Directions collection, and the aide was much appreciated. His arcane allusions, scatterbrained structure and subtle meter devices could have quickly gone over my head if it wasn't for the use of the two books in unison. Indeed, Pound was actually quite a talented poet when working with conventional meter and rhyme form, as this iambic section from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley attests:

"The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.

Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel."

Displayed here is a subtlety of rhythm and agility of rhyme that is truly unique. And beyond any technical aspect, Pound is voicing a deeply sour cynicism with a timeless wit that could easily have come from the book of Euripides. For those of you doubtful of Pound's ability as a poet, please look up Mauberley on the Guttenberg Project site. I promise you wont regret it.

But of course many criticisms of Mr. Pound are still relevant. His knack for inserting lines of Homeric Greek into his otherwise-English verses is quite obnoxious, and while the mysteries of the infamous Cantos are fascinating to unlock, its utopian ideals could have been backed with a more interesting text.

Although Pound the Myth may be a bit more alive than Pound the Poet or Pound the Man, this primer gives the reader a good look at the latter two.

[Andrew]

Hmm. Hmm. I hadn't read Pound in years, and I thought that before diving headlong into the Cantos, I'd try the chef's tasting menu. Glad I did. There were some gorgeous, short imageistic things that lingered in the head beautifully. There were some Medieval translations that, to this alienated modern, just sound like Led Zeppelin lyrics. There were some Chinese translations that resonated a bit better. And there was the main course, the big long things, peppered with untranslated Greek, that often moved the soul and often were just bloviated, tryhard bullshit, somehow the worst of Hegel, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg, finished with a langoustine reduction.

Why did I painfully overextend that fine-dining metaphor? Because that's what Ezra Pound is. Fine dining. Which can be elevating and enlightening (there are times when I've dropped 300 bucks on a meal and it's been worth every fucking penny and more). And which can be dull and suffocating and joyless, even when it has moments of splendor.

[Stine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suppose there is a reason why Ezra Pound is not so widely read and never reached a wider audience, the way T.S. Eliot did – his poetry simply isn't that good. Eliot's combination of intellect and emotion is something Pound seems to have never been able to achieve. Neither his experimental form nor his themes are particularily interesting, and will only reach and audience looking to compare poetry from that era, or someone interested in exploring Pound's imagist poetry.
His blatant anti-semitism and extreme fascist sympathies also puts a lid on his reputation, not only as a person but as an artist.
All in all it's somewhat interesting as an exploration of imagist poetry, but in my opinion his poetry style is vastly infused by the fact that it's simply not very good.

[Abhi V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parts of this were just inscrutable: too much untranslated text from many distinct languages....

A supposition: Being educated classically is being able to understand all of the poems on the first pass (at the same time I have a hard time imagining the kind of person with a strong enough grasp of all of what's required, & at such a level where the intended reaction isn't interrupted by pride...)

What I was able to understand I very much liked, although the fixation on usury was a little creepy & seems improbable....

[Sway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fell in love with Pound during my Undergrad, I had completely forgot how powerful and comfortable his poetry is to me.

[Адриана К. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Дори зората не ни носи толкова живот
като този час на светла свежест,
час на пробуждане до теб..."