Volume 50, Number 20 · December 18, 2003
What Ez Could Do
By Charles Simic
Poems and Translations
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth
Library of America, 1,363 pp., $45.00
The Pisan Cantos
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth
New Directions, 159 pp., $13.95 (paper)
There's no great contemporary who is less read than Ezra Pound, I recall Hugh Kenner saying more than thirty years ago. If that was true then, it's certainly even truer today. How widely is Pound being taught in colleges and universities beyond the few poems included in anthologies? Are young American poets reading him and being influenced by him? I suspect not much. More than Eliot, Stevens, and Moore, Pound is looked upon as an impossibly difficult poet. Not many read his essays either, and yet when his subject was poetry, Pound was one of our most astute literary critics. His writings on religious, historical, economic, and political themes are another matter. He was wrong about a lot of things. After 1945, when his fascist sympathies and his broadcasts on the Rome radio during the war became widely known and he was brought back to the United States to stand trial as a traitor and subsequently committed to a madhouse, there was even more reason to be wary of him. What does one do with a poet who compared Hitler to Jeanne d'Arc? These two new books with their magnificent poems and translations, meticulously annotated and edited by Richard Sieburth, remind us once again that the question will not go away.
Review, 4378 words
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