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“... book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact one of its great virtues is that it doesn’t try to minimise how difficult The Cantos is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those inseparable from the nature of the enterprise ...”

“... in the 19th century between Canterbury and Rome has given place in the 20th to a man torn between Ezra Pound’s America and D.H. Lawrence’s England.’ The analogy is not extravagant. Davie is the pattern of a divided man, equally at home in an English or American cultural context, and with ‘a nearly anguished concern for two poetries that may ...”

“... lyrical and slangy, pathetic and bathetic, that represented his stroke of genius. Perhaps it was Pound’s example that gave him the go-ahead. Berryman was for a while in correspondence with Pound, having been commissioned to write an introduction to a selection from the older man’s work. ...”

“... A Book and Ryder, a long novel which included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life with Nora Flood), as ...”

“... measurement of all of the above? ‘The origins of the small review are lost in obscurity,’ Ezra Pound wrote in his 1930 essay ‘Small Magazines’, but Brooker and Thacker do their best to reconstruct them. One point of departure, in Britain at least, was the early 19th-century tradition of the quarterly review. The Edinburgh Review (founded in ...”

“... the literary scene. In the closing weeks of 1913 he had received a letter of inquiry from Ezra Pound: Yeats had mentioned Joyce’s work in a casual conversation; would he have anything to hand? Before he could reply, a second letter from Pound had arrived. Yeats had turned up a copy of his poem, ‘I Hear an ...”

“... correspondents. The first letter in this collection, written when Lowell was 19, is to Ezra Pound. He describes himself as eccentric, subject to violent passions, keen to learn to be a poet – to ‘work under you and forge my way into reality’. Pound replied, and Lowell soon wrote again, reaffirming his ...”

“... safely pass him by’ – the best advice, perhaps, to send to that particular corner of Suffolk. Ezra Pound? ‘He is (or rather was),’ Hart-Davis pronounces, ‘one of those people whose influence is infinitely greater and more important than their writings ... his own works seem to me largely wind and rubbish.’ There are moments when one seems to ...”

“... suitable match for a woman brought up by such a mother, and one who had already been seduced by Ezra Pound and proposed to by Yeats. Selfish and jealous, he made hideous scenes, deprived his wife of food and money, set fire to her clothes. If he had talent, Maud couldn’t detect it. Yet he was in some ways her true complement, another deviant Catholic ...”

“... has rarely attributed the ills of the world to their very existence. It needed Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, none of them native Britons, to introduce to English literature the programmatic hatred that mere distaste was too lazy to confect.’ Pearce, who doesn’t agree with Raphael’s characterisation of Belloc, shows to what anxious ...”

“... and Joseph Rock – the first Western Naxi scholar, whose writings haunt the last Cantos of Ezra Pound – has been canonised as a local saint. The government remains stubbornly unaccommodating, however, in the case of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice, popular in the villages, which officials see as a subversive force that must be suppressed. This ...”

“... to telegraphic snippets of description which seem designed to read like lines of poetry. It was Ezra Pound who, in Cathay, segmented the habitual flow of English verse so that each individual line became a distinct element in the composition: Chinese poetry, filtered through Japanese and then English translation, gave him his model. Mitchell here tries ...”

“... the girls with tales of her prewar meetings in London with figures such as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound (who apparently had a habit of playing her piano with his nose when drunk), H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit, who, Weldon’s grandmother tells her, ‘was very excitable and . . . ran round the corridors at night screaming’. Meanwhile, Weldon attends a ...”

“... a famous passage written just over two centuries earlier by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, the Ezra Pound of his day. Callimachus, too, says that at the beginning of his career Apollo warned him to keep his Muse slim, but Callimachus never ignored Apollo’s advice, and in all his works maintained an ironising pose in the face of claims to ...”

“... as his authority on that subject.* He was all for making it new, but not in quite the same way as Ezra Pound. At one point he too could have produced a reading list of essential books; but as time went by he seemed to care less than he had in his wilder, more assertive days about convincing or converting others. In his early New York years he was much ...”