Donald Davie's excellent Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor was published in 1964. He has now written a new introduction to Pound [entitled Ezra Pound] … which duplicates little of his earlier work; it is tightly compressed, thoroughly eccentric, and equally indispensable. Davie surveys Pound's important work, probes much of the major work on Pound, and offers suggestions as to where scholarship had better look next. Despite this scope the book is nothing in the way of a reader's guide, but it includes important contributions to the discovery of Allen Upward's relation to Pound and the Cantos, and a brilliant treatment of the Pound sound in a chapter on "Rhythms in the Cantos."…
Donald Davie goes a long way toward showing where and why Ezra Pound is better than everyone else. Davie shows too, humanely but clearly, where and why, despite revisions and because of them, Pound is worse. (p. 670)
William Clarkson, "Ezra Pound Ltd.," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 667-70.
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