Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

This selection from the Cantos was made by Ezra Pound himself in 1965. It is intended to "indicate main elements" in the long poem -- his personal epic -- with which he was engaged for more than fifty years. His choice includes, of course, a number of the Cantos most admired by critics and anthologists, such as Canto XIII ("Kung [Confucius] walked by the dynastic temple..."), Canto XLV ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone...") and the passage from The Pisan Cantos (LXXXI) beginning "What thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross," and so the book is an ideal introduction for newcomers to the great work. But it has, too, particular interest for the already initiated reader and the specialist, in its revelation, through Pound's own selection of "main elements," of the relative importance which he himself placed on various motifs as they figure in the architecture of the whole poem. Book jacket.

Ezra Pound's Cantos remains among the most influential and difficult of twentieth century poetic writings. But now, for the first time, Rabaté's powerful and original study presents a theory of reading adequate to the challenge of Pound's writing. Using elements from Lacanian psycho-analysis and Heidegger's powerful meditation of poetry and language, this book constructs a theory of reading which both gives full force to the strategies of writing deployed in the Cantos and to the historical and political situations to which those strategies are a response. This study provides a fresh reading of the familiar Pound canon: Homer, Dante, Ovid but also of the less well-known: Ruskin, Browning, Frobenius. Pound's practice of quotation is understood in the context of a new poetic discourse characterized by parapraxis, ellipsis, condensation and autonomous "voices" which refer the division of the speaking subject back to an "omniform" intellect capable of taking on any new personality at will. Crucial to an understanding of Pound's situation is the relationship between Chinese and Greek culture, an analysis of which allows Rabaté to elaborate the tragic dimension in Pound's life and works. This book also parallels and contrasts Pound with his major contemporaries such as Eliot and Joyce and with his immediate heirs, like William Carlos Williams, H.D., Zukofsky, and Olson.

Prose work by Ezra Pound, published in 1938. A brilliant but fragmentary work, it consists of a series of apparently unrelated essays reflecting his thoughts on various aspects of culture and history.

First American edition published in 1938 under the title: Culture.