文档介绍：“WHANG—Boom—Boom—cast delicacy to the winds.” Thus Ezra Pound in a letter to his father, urging the old man to help promote his first published collection. It might have been the poet's manifesto.
Pound is as divisive a figure today as he was in his own lifetime. For some he was the leading figure of the Modernist movement who redefined what poetry was and could be; and who, in his role as cultural impresario, gave vital impetus to the literary careers of . Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, among others. But for many Pound remains a freak and an embarrassment, a clinical nutcase and vicious anti-Semite who churned out a lot of rable tosh before losing the pletely.
During the second world war he broadcast pro-Fascist radio programmes from Italy and later avoided trial for treason at home only because he was declared insane. On his release from St Elizabeth's Hospital near Washington, DC, he returned to Italy (“America is a lunatic asylum”), where he died in 1972 aged 87.
David Moody, emeritus professor of English at York University, makes a strong case for Pound's “generous energy” and the “disruptive, regenerative force of his genius”. His approach (unlike Pound's) is uncontroversial. He follows the poet's progress chronologically from his childhood in Idaho—still, at the time of his birth in 1885, part of the wild west—to his conquest of literary London between