“... represent an unpleasant surprise’. Mantel’s pictorialism can become almost imagist, in the Ezra Pound sense, when she is describing Jane. So when she first touches Henry VIII, ‘her hand, a petal, hovers above his sleeve; then it descends, and flesh grazes embroidery’. Remember Pound’s ‘In a Station of ...”

“... obscure and passionate. One fragment of Ibycus reads ‘he flies in the alien void’; another is Ezra Pound in embryo: ‘glory … mad … the sting’. Sappho’s deliciously burning fragment 31 (‘no: tongue breaks and thin/fire is racing under the skin’) survived in Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime, which encouraged a belief in the 18th ...”

“... on novel-writing’ or ‘a landmark in the history of the novel as written in English’, as Ezra Pound says it is in his characteristically truculent note on the notes, also published in this new edition, James’s sketch nevertheless is a treasure. What we see is James talking to himself about his novel (where else shall we hear him say ‘sort ...”

“... most crucial patron. Of those who contributed to Hemingway’s career and writing practice, only Ezra Pound emerged unwounded. It is not clear why, though Pound’s imagism (deal with the thing itself, avoid abstract values, cut down on adjectives) was both the single most identifiable ‘influence’ on Hemingway’s ...”

“... influence exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ‘echo system’ to kindle song ‘from the ...”

“... and certainly much more avantgardist than that of Bloomsbury. Brooke, for example, met Pound and Lawrence, while Virginia Woolf never did. He reviewed Personae in 1909 in the Cambridge Review and saw brilliance as well as obscurity, the work of a poet who could become great. He read Sons and Lovers on a transatlantic liner and remarked on its ...”

“... alternative to humour and wit, gratitude and dignity are the conditions for the best of both. When Ezra Pound edited the first excerpts from J.B. Yeats’s letters, in 1917, he acknowledged the difficulties of the enterprise: ‘In making a selection from them my great fear is not that I shall leave out something, for I must leave out a great deal, but ...”

“... deeply anti-semitic) French politician Lucien Millevoye. (Iseult had had an affair with Ezra Pound before Francis married her; in 1917 Yeats had proposed marriage to her.) Stuart published poetry which Yeats admired. He fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and was interned. He published his first book of poetry in 1923 and lived ...”

“... escape from all that science would bring to our attention. While contemporaries such as Eliot or Pound yearned to attribute to the modern poet the objectivity of a professional scientist, as illustrated by Eliot’s famous comparison in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ of a poet’s mind in action with what happens ‘when a bit of finely filiated ...”

“... Steiner – who, on a television programme last November, discussed the case of Eliot and that of Ezra Pound with Professor Ricks, Annie Cohen-Solal and Clive James. Professor Steiner began by discomfiting Ricks: there were, he remarked humorously, two attacks in the TLS which Professor Ricks, fresh from his transatlantic flight, would not have had time ...”

“... that had puzzled me’. (His creator reacted similarly in 1934 when another excitable American, Ezra Pound, wrote to enlist his help in lifting the lid on ‘the game that has been going on since 1919’: Buchan declined to involve himself but allowed that ‘there is some very ugly work going on behind the scenes’.) Hannay is right to be ...”

“... Owen Aherne. Pride did not prevent his acknowledging such youthful talents as the disrespectful Ezra Pound, whose critical comments the older man sometimes accepted. When Pound tampered with some poems by Yeats before sending them on to the Chicago journal Poetry, the poet was cross but only briefly: ‘he has, I ...”

“... knowthat every dog has his dayand when he’s gonehe’s gone ...That the magisterial influence of Pound, Eliot and Williams should have boiled down, by the late Sixties and early Seventies, to such bosh (‘Toronto Rain’ was first published in 1968, and its inglorious resurrection today looks like an act of deliberately cruelty by the Oxford University ...”

“... jeered at the Republicans: ‘The sodomites are on your side;/The cowards and the cranks.’ Ezra Pound said the enemy wasn’t Franco, but big-time international finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’ Graham Greene hadn’t replied to the Left Review because he couldn’t make up his ...”

“... at the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto in 1965, where they promenaded with an enfeebled Ezra Pound, and at the legendary Berkeley Poetry Conference the same year. His letters from this period are full of excitement – ‘some fag in heaven must be working for me’ – as he contemplates the Keats-Shelley memorial and vistas of international ...”