Volume 33, Number 4 · March 13, 1986
The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound
By Alfred Kazin
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, A Lume Spento, in Venice 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 to Read, Make it New, the ABC of Reading; Pound's literary essays and letters, his translations from the Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, love poems from ancient Egypt, Sophocles' Women of Trachis. There are many more in general circulation.
Feature, 7949 words
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