[Donald Davie's Ezra Pound] stimulates disagreements of a constructive kind. This alone should be enough to recommend it. Davie gets the year of Pound's death wrong (1972, not 1973), the year of first publication of the Urcantos wrong (1917, not 1919), and still manages to produce the most trust-worthy and acute introduction to Pound's mind and art that we yet possess. If we cannot always rely on this book for facts concerning dates, we can rely fully upon Davie's ear to pick up sounds and rhythms that we were previously unaware of, and to demonstrate their function in the poem as a whole. Moreover, Davie provides us as well with original interpretations of the reasons behind Pound's methods which square with the poem as it is experienced. (p. 485)
What makes this book so valuable is that Davie's comments are both new and controversial; one feels positively impelled to disagree in some measure with almost everything he says, while his overall sense of Pound's work is both just and convincing. (p. 486)
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