Ezra Pound Controversy | Alfred Kazin (essay date 1988)
Alfred Kazin (essay date 1988)
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...
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