[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 manuscripts of Monteverdi in Venetian libraries and brought them out in the twentieth century for us to hear; the man who in his supreme savant investigations of vowels went back to the great musicians of Renaissance times to hear how they heard vowels and set them to music syllable by syllable and so came on the works of Vivaldi also, and brought him forth to public light…. (p. 180)

Pound...