In the following essay, Benstock examines American female modernist writers living in Paris, believing that many of them were ignored unfairly by such American editors as Ezra Pound, whom she perceives as predisposed to give short shrift to women writers.

In the following essay, Lentricchia examines the modernist ideals and Emersonian influence behind Pound's ambitious innovation in The Cantos. According to Lentricchia, "The form he invented is at once the representation of a culture he thought to be in fragments and an offering of hope for a different kind of future, rooted in the narrative of common lineage and destiny."

In the following essay, Sicari argues that Pound's explanation of heroic action in his pre-war Cantos helped formulate his later professed admiration for Fascism.

In the following essay, Fraser charts the critical perception of Pound, particularly that of Wyndham Lewis, and in what way his politics may have colored his legacy.

In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Watts attempts to define Pound's The Cantos in light of the author's method, tone, goals, and ultimately whether it effectively disseminated its stated aims.

In the following essay, Goldensohn disagrees with the various rationales often given for Pound's anti-Semitism and that despite the historical tendencies to forgive and forget such indiscretions, Pound's anti-Semitism continues to matter.

In the following essay, Moncef examines Pound's disdain for gold as a symbol of evil. According to Moncef "the malevolent aspect of gold exists in its own right throughout Pound's works; however, within this negative imaginary dimension of gold, there also lies its positive function as a master-signifier of discursive and economic author-ity."

In the following essay, Kazin studies Pound's politics and reflects upon how it affected his writing style, particularly his Cantos as a whole.

In the following essay, Wilhelm analyzes some of Pound's later poetic outputs from the 1950s and the efforts to free him from St. Elizabeths Hospital.

In the following essay, Xie discusses Pound's interpretation of Chinese verse in Cathay. According to Xie, Pound differs from "the Victorian masters of the elegiac before him" through "his skillful and extensive reliance upon the speaker-persona as the primary device for rendering subjective emotion and elegiac mood, as amply and successfully demonstrated in Cathay."

In the following essay, Coley summarizes the events surrounding Pound's selection for the Bollingen Award and gives the opinions of many of the leading literary figures of the period and on which side of the debate they fell on.

In the following essay, North notes the many instances where Pound's historical and factual memory seems to fail him, but believes that for him it was a tool he used in his attempts to define culture.

In the following essay, Géfin examines the aesthetic and ethical concerns behind Pound's ideogrammic method, particularly the use of Chinese pictographs and literary allusion in The Cantos.

In the following essay, Young relates Pound's transitional sense of both Modernism and the artistic ‘mask’ to that of the African American writing experience.

In the following essay, originally published in the Partisan Review in April 1949, Berryman attempts to mark the influences underlying the various phases of Pound's work from his early roots in Imagism to his later Fascist views.

In the following essay, Tuma attempts to trace the roots of Pound's later political course by analyzing Pound's 1912 essay Patria Mia, a cultural critique of Pound's belief that a forthcoming American renaissance was approaching.

In the following essay, Bishop discusses Pound's effort to continue his epic historical vision in The Cantos after his traumatic imprisonment in Pisa and the demise of Mussolini. According to Bishop, "the jarring tonalities and circuitous associations" of his verse beginning with "Canto 74" "is the drama of Pound's recovery."

In the following essay, Wolfe examines contradictory aspects of Pound's democratic and elitist sentiments, particularly concerning the relationship between art and economics. Wolfe contends that "Pound's literary ideology has at least as much in common with Ralph Waldo Emerson's individualism as it does with Benito Mussolini's fascism."

In the following essay, Miller offers a reexamination of critical dispute surrounding Hugh Selwyn Mauberley from its publication to the present. "Once Pound's greatest success," writes Miller, "it is today perhaps his least respected poem."

In the following essay, Chace analyzes Pound's 1938 prose treatise A Guide to Kulchur, particularly its anti-Semitism.

Because of [the] cavalier disregard of ascertainable facts and documents we can be offered, as a portrait of the youthful Pound, a figure who [according to George Quasha] "was seeking a radical redefinition of poetic possibilities and returning to the roots of civilization in order to show how much had been lost in the watery conventions handed over to us by the nineteenth century." The ascertainable records present us on the contrary with a man who admired Swinburne and Thomas Hardy and D. G....

In the following essay, Fiedler states that of the poets of their generation, history will likely give Robert Frost the popular acclaim and Pound the critical praise.

In the following essay, originally published inCommentary's April 1951 issue, Viereck debates whether “form and technique can be considered apart from context and meaning” by examining Pound's awarding of the 1949 Bollingen Prize for poetry.

When A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared in 1930, William Carlos Williams remarked with characteristic insight: "A criticism of Pound's Cantos could not be better concerned, I think, than in considering them in relation to the principal move in imaginative writing today—that away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality." (p. 91) To understand Pound's gradual shift from what Williams called "the word as symbol toward the word as reality," we might profit...

In the following essay, Stock warns that the literary biographer's standard approach to analysis—to explore an author's letters, essays, and other related materials to gain insight into his writing—may not provide accurate critical insight into Pound's poetry.

In the following essay, Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former president of the Poetry Society of America, heatedly explains why Pound is undeserving of the 1949 Bollingen Award for poetry.

The longest and most obscure section of Ezra Pound's Cantos has until recently been all but ignored. His ten cantos devoted to John Adams, when they are discussed, are described by Poundians as an extreme but viable example of Pound's poetic method. Old fashioned readers, argue the Poundians, are put off by chronological discontinuities and by apparently obscure passages, but these fall into place in the harmonious design of the whole work. This defense at once invokes the authority of Pound&#...

In the following essay, originally published in 1964, Stock reviews how writer Ernest Fenollosa and Chinese poetic methods influenced Pound's poetic style and philosophy of writing.

If there is one word which provides the clue to the life-work of Ezra Pound, it is "productivity." To him, man was essentially a productive animal, and if one thinks of Pound's aestheticism in this light, it ceases to be an escape from life, as in the case of previous Ivory Tower aestheticism. On the contrary, the life of the ordinary worker is subsumed under that of the artist. Even animals and insects are for Pound essentially artists…. Everything that helped production was goo...

In the following essay, originally published in 1952, Bottrall, a well-known English poet, positively reflects upon Pound's body of work, believing “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” to be his artistic peak, and that his later work, while still excellent, did not live up to his earlier potential.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound's ironic portrait of the artist, stands at the end of the Imagist Decade, from 1910 to 1920, when literature in English became recognizably Modern…. [Lines] from the second section of the poem imply that the modern revolution in literary style came from two main impulses—focus on the image, and defiance of the age, an age which was preoccupied in that second decade of the century with the First World War. Modern literature, it seems fair to say, began as a c...

In the following review of Thrones de los Cantares, Schwartz concludes that although the poem has many self-indulgent aspects to it, there is still inherent beauty within its verses.

Surprisingly little has been written about Pound's translation of the Old English "Seafarer." (p. 127) Truly, the scholar who possesses the original poem is in an awkward position, faced with two poems remarkably alike but different; his approach inevitably suffers from a psychological interference—something like hearing a new interpretation of a familiar song. He may prefer a bland Modern English substitute, that reminds him of the original, to a fully recreated poem. The schola...

The two last poems of Ripostes, "The Return" and "The Alchemist," facing each other, offer a chance to watch Pound's genius quarrying out its resources. Both poems triumph in the skill with which they conjure up their particular moment; the return of the gods and the transformation of inferior—though lovely, alive—metals into gold. Both poems are miracles of equipoise. In "The Return" we must recognize the provisional, brilliant peace Pound has ...

The reader who is not a student of poetry has [a] ground for indifference [towards Pound]. Pound, he has always heard, has no "matter." Granting the "importance" of his verse, granting the possibility that having been for poets fertile it might prove on acquaintance agreeable or beautiful, what has he to do with this sport, a matterless poetry?… "I confess," Eliot once wrote, "that I am seldom interested in what he is saying, but only in the way he say...

[We] need to know about the curious vocabulary used in the "Mauberley 1920" half of [Hugh Selwyn Mauberley] and, crucially, the problem of Mauberley's temperament remains an urgent issue in the reading experience. Professor [John J.] Espey established the formula [in his Ezra Pound's 'Mauberley'; a Study in Composition] for that temperament which, in one way or another, has characterised all subsequent commentaries: "… the relation is, I think, clear e...

Although readers may disagree as to the kinds of groupings one can find in The Cantos, almost everyone will recognize that cantos VIII through XI form a distinct unit, unified by their preoccupation with the deeds and exploits of Sigismondo Malatesta, an Italian prince of the Renaissance, Lord of Rimini during the middle years of the 15th Century. By almost all accounts Sigismondo (or Sigismundo, as Pound spelled the name) was a much detested figure, although his infamous reputation can be traced to Pope Pi...

Joyce's and Eliot's concern for time certainly needs no emphasis. Everyone has spoken of it. But Pound's concern is probably less widely realized. And this despite the fact that his critics have written significantly about its importance. It is perhaps best, then, to begin with two of the finest of these, with Daniel Pearlman, who has stated Pound's interest strongly ("The Cantos, as I read the poem, is precisely an elaboration of this thesis—that the central proble...

In the following essay, originally published in 1959, Tate—the famed poet and head of the Bollingen Prize jury—defends his selection of Pound as the winner of their 1949 award as being due to Pound's efforts in regenerating language, though oddly he has strong criticism of the Pisan Cantos.

As we read through the original verse of Ezra Pound (as distinct from his "translations") from the beginning of his career until the end, that is, from A Lume Spento to the final Cantos, we become convinced that Pound was a poet not for all time but for an age. We must hasten to add, however—what an age! The complexity, depth, and brilliance of the poetry written during the first six or seven decades of this century will rival that of any other period of comparable length in the history...

[Pound] was the greatest poet of the age!… The one poet who heard speech as spoken from the actual body and began to measure it to lines that could be chanted rhythmically without violating human common sense, without going into hysterical fantasy or robotic metronomic repeat, stale-emotioned echo of an earlier culture's forms, the first poet to open up fresh new forms in America after Walt Whitman—certainly the greatest poet since Walt Whitman … the man who discovered the manusc...