SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “Homer to Mussolini: The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound.” In Ezra Pound: The Legacy of Kulchur, edited by Marcel Smith and William A. Ulmer, pp. 25-50. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1988.

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 museum of modern literature no figure commands more space than Ezra Pound. Born in 1885 and dying at the ripe age of eighty-seven in 1972, he published his first book of poems in Venice, A lume spento, in 1908. My packed shelves hold almost thirty volumes of his writings—the early collected poems in Personae; the final one-volume collected Cantos of 1970; Pound on The Spirit of Romance, on “Kulchur,” on Joyce, on the classic Noh Theater of Japan and the Confucian Odes; Pound on How to Read, Make It New...