Kirsch reviews Daniel Swift’s look at Pound’s work and life.
And that process was as complex, often as illegible, as thought itself. Free-associating on characters from the Odyssey to Confucius and from the Italian Renaissance to the American Revolution, Pound produced a self-portrait as “difficult” as any cubist masterpiece.’
As previously posted:
Another interesting piece here, as our author takes a look at one of the most important modern poems:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Brief Bio-Pound really wanted to get out of America. To London first, as the father of modernist poetry, and eventually Italy where he made pro-Axis rants on Italian radio during World War II. When American troops finally got him, they put him in a box for 25 days. He was never quite the same after that, though not exactly stable to begin with. Stable in his art, perhaps.
Alba (Dawn Song)
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn