Description
As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parceled out his work to a variety of journals in England, America, France, and Italy. This new edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication. We can observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford's English Review and Harriet Monroe's Chicago-based Poetry, and then as an agent provocateur for the avant-garde Little Review, Blast, and The Dial.
Unlike all previous selections, this volume provides annotation to all the early poems as well as a running commentary on the later Cantos - indispensable to any reader wanting to follow Pound on his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century. The editor, Richard Sieburth, provides a chronology of Pound's life, a new preface, and an informative afterword, "Selecting Pound." Also included in the appendix are T. S. Eliot's and John Berryman's original introductions to Pound's Selected Poems.
About the Author
New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: "Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful. Award-winning translator, scholar, and essayist Richard Sieburth has translated books by Henri Michaux, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Louise Labe, Gerard de Nerval, and Nostradamus. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the fathers of modernism and a defining voice in English-language poetry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Reviews
"Starred Review. At last we have what we've needed for more than half a century: a career-spanning selection gathering all of Pound's major verse, offering both the academic and pleasure reader more than enough Pound to get them going...This will become the standard Pound."
Book Information
ISBN 9780811217330
Author Ezra Pound
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Weight(grams) 584g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 150mm * 30mm