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.

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.

Ezra Pound's classic book about the meaning of literature.

Genius, Confucian, fascist, traitor, peace activist—Ezra Pound—love him or hate him, he is impossible to ignore as one of the most influential modernists and controversial poets of the twentieth century. His life, as Alec Marsh makes clear in this biography, raises vital questions for anyone interested in politics, art, and poetry. No writer of his stature promoted so many acquaintances who would go on to become such distinguished names in their own right—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford were among the many who benefited from Pound’s enthusiasm and editorial suggestions. And without Pound’s generosity to his fellow writers, literary modernism might not have happened, or have been the significant, influential movement that it became. Yet by 1925, Pound himself was living in obscurity in Italy, having trouble publishing his own work. There he became a Mussolini enthusiast and was eventually indicted for treason by the United States before being judged mentally incompetent to stand trial. Marsh takes us inside these years in an attempt to uncover what happened. How did such a great modern artist succomb to such views? Was he a traitor? And was he, in fact, insane? Analyzing Pound’s prose and poetry as well as his magnum opus, The Cantos, Marsh provides clear insights into Pound’s work as well as a coherent account of his troubled life that will be essential reading for students and fans of modernist literature.

Ezra Pound is one of the most visible and influential poets of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most complex, his poetry containing historical and mythical allusions, experiments of form and style and often controversial political views. Yet Pound's life and work continue to fascinate. This Introduction, first published in 2005, is designed to help students reading Pound for the first time. Pound scholar Ira B. Nadel provides a guide to the rich webs of allusion and stylistic borrowings and innovations in Pound's writing. He offers a clear overview of Pound's life, works, contexts and reception history and his multidimensional career as a poet, translator, critic, editor, anthologist and impresario, a career that placed him at the heart of literary modernism. This invaluable and accessible introduction explains the huge contribution Pound made to the development of modernism in the early twentieth century.

An international team of scholars provides an invaluable introduction to Pound's work and life.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.