Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
Ezra Pound
By Michael Wood
The Pound Era
by Hugh Kenner
University of California Press, 606 pp., $14.95
A ZBC of Ezra Pound
by Christine Brooke-Rose
University of California Press, 297 pp., $7.95
Ezra Pound, aged eighty-seven, died in the night of November 1, 1972, released at last from a long, agitated silence ('but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning'). For ten years, haunted by despair, contrition, or some other, nameless, more complicated sentiment, he had spoken very little. 'I ruin everything I touch,' he told an Italian journalist in 1963. 'I have been mistaken, always…I have arrived at doubt too late….' He thought The Cantos were 'botched,' and confessed to Allen Ginsberg (in a conversation reported by Michael Reck in Evergreen Review) that his worst mistake had been 'that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.'
Review, 5024 words
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