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“... Not long after Ezra Pound, the precocious Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris already equipped with a style derived from the Jacobean dramatists and French post-symbolist poets, and so with as good a claim as any to be counted among the founders of Modernism. In 1936 T. S. Eliot warmly sponsored Nightwood, and one has heard since that her vision of Hell can be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes ...”

“... to the mind.’ There was a teaching anthology in 1948, A Test of Poetry, very close in format to Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, which placed poems from different eras side by side and evaluated them by measuring ‘sight, sound and intellection’. Any poem can only be improved by reading it, as is also true of ...”

“... of the Communist Party had long since passed. He was still mulling over his relationship with Ezra Pound, whom he had admired and published many years earlier, before their political differences set in. The poem ends with a quotation from Canto IV. The Materials, only Oppen’s second book, after a gap of nearly thirty years, was published in ...”

“... An Inventory of Effects. McLuhan once got Kenner to drive him (he didn’t drive) to visit Ezra Pound in St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, where he’d been incarcerated in 1945, having pleaded insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 ...”

“... In the years since their publication in 1948, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos have given rise to interpretative bad faith on a scale unusual even by the lofty standards of literary criticism. The reason for this is not some special failing on the part of Pound’s adherents, but rather the burden of expectation laid from the outset on a sequence of 11 poems written in the US Army’s Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa in the summer and autumn of 1945 ...”

“... and Robert Lowell. For Carne-Ross, the continuities and echo-densities which relate Pindar to Ezra Pound, which make Leopardi stylise a scene in the exact light of Horace, which provide Ariosto and Gongora with stylistically diverse but equally dynamic relations to Virgil, relations which modulate, in their turn, into the idiom of Lorca – these ...”

“... had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in Eliot’s later years, the uncompromising seriousness of F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny. Brooker’s single ‘curve’ is not really adequate: at least two are ...”

“... some as famous as she was, treasured every word she wrote them. There survive a hundred letters to Ezra Pound and another hundred to T.S. Eliot; five hundred to the historical novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and sixty to Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), who was Bryher’s lover. Elizabeth Bishop, a favourite in later years, received more than two hundred, over ...”

“... On the eve of the First World War, London still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23, Eliot was 26, but Frost was almost 39. He had been writing poetry, most of it unpublished, for some twenty years, and the difference in style was striking ...”

“... outbreak of modern war. The atmosphere is almost cosy but somehow charged with impending shock. Ezra Pound had not yet arrived but he was on the way, and Laurence Binyon, quietly running the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, was unknowingly preparing himself to write ‘For the Fallen’. Catherine Phillips expresses herself in ...”

“... and what he admires about the writers he thinks worthy of the appellation ‘Modernist’ – Ezra Pound above all – is a habit or quality of ‘openness’. ‘The “meaning” is not the poem,’ and it is presumably not the novel, either; novels, though for various reasons subject to more constraint than poems, can also eschew simple ...”

“... as an imaginative proxy for Longley’s own soldier father. Another less visible influence is Ezra Pound, both Pound the free and eclectic translator and Pound the poet of phanopoeia, or the vividly appearing image. In reading Longley you can see the clarity, eclecticism (and ...”

“... met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘...”

“... once been some ‘obscene’ comic verses (these, excised from the notebook and given by Eliot to Ezra Pound, were later discovered among the Pound papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and ...”

“... of the young man, Tom Pickard, and found much in the poetry that excited him. He wrote to Dorothy Pound in June 1965: ‘Well, I thought, if poetry really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent ...”