“... nonsense anyway. This is roughly the position of Maud Ellmann’s brisk first book. Eliot called Pound’s Cantos ‘a reticent biography’, and she thinks we should apply the same description to Eliot’s work. According to her, early Modernism, despite the contrary pretence, was always individualistic, and steeped in Bergson. Now Eliot certainly went to ...”

“... his heirs and their sons; other tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by ...”

“... read aloud to her in her hoarse little male impersonator’s voice. She recommended them to Ezra Pound (who printed ‘Fête’ in the Egoist) and, indeed, to every critic she could think of. She perhaps encouraged Charlotte unduly when she wrote to her: ‘I know one poet whose breast beats like a dynamo under an iron-gray tailor-made suit (I ...”

“... his ideas through a network of related and interpenetrating images, and he is a master of what Ezra Pound dubbed phanopoeia, ‘the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina’. When I remember reading The Assault, I remember watching a film – and in fact it has already been made into one. It is a book to be read at one go. Indeed it resists being ...”

“... dealings she aimed high too, for the hyperspace that is now reserved for such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But she never got there. And in her personal life, Riding staked a lot on her ability to transcend the double standard that causes brattish behaviour in men to be admired, in women to be reviled. She failed in that as well. There is nothing the ...”

“... into an experience with which they wouldn’t wish to part. In ‘The Fête’ – a poem Ezra Pound chose for the Egoist, and on which Knox drew for his parody (it begins: ‘To-night again the moon’s white mat/Stretches across the dormitory floor’) – a sixteen-year-old French boy recalls escaping from boarding school to go to the ...”

“... on its 1760 title-page. The Fragments initiated a passion for Ossian which, according to Ezra Pound, was the starting point for the ‘Romantic awakening’. Poems attributed to Ossian had come down through two millennia as part of oral culture. With the publication of Macpherson’s elaborations from original fragments, joining the ballads and ...”

“... This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female employees of West End drapery ...”

“... himself rather more cautious than Kenner’s other famous friend, the eager and flesh-pressing Ezra Pound, and offered Kenner just three pieces of information: the first was ‘a summary of the contents of the Ur-Waste Land, so far as he could remember them’; the second was ‘a gloss on the word “lot” in “Whispers of Immortality” ’ (‘he ...”

“... prefer it, one of the most heartwarming – episodes in the history of early Modernism centres on Ezra Pound’s attempt to ‘liberate’ T.S. Eliot from his clerk’s job at Lloyds Bank. In 1921, Pound started up a fund called Bel Esprit and set about trying to persuade 30 subscribers to fork out ten pounds ...”

“... what I am,’ Hill reflected in 2000, and in his view the ‘great master of high modernism’ was Ezra Pound, who propounded at length in the Cantos and elsewhere his view that if a culture got money wrong (he called this ‘Usura’) then everything went wrong. In an interview Hill said he appreciated in Pound ‘the ...”

“... the story of a 13th-century troubadour but great truths about history, self, poetry and the Ideal. Ezra Pound later admired, with some reason, the poem’s endeavour to ‘tell you something’, as well as the ‘variety in the rhythm’; Browning’s contemporaries saw only bluster and self-involvement. The Parnassian figures who had begun to welcome him ...”

“... Hamburg, as well as his first formal portraits, again thanks to Schwarzwald, who introduced him to Ezra Pound and Arnold Schoenberg. The Pound picture is usually given a prominent place in Brandt’s work today, but he kept it from being reproduced or exhibited until the end of his life. It is a competent portrait in ...”

“... Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and one which seems much more arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d ...”

“... for a relatively short while – the most exacting figures of literary London, including Ezra Pound. The English Gitanjali is a shadowy approximation of the marvellous original; if it continues to be of interest, it’s for cultural and even psychological reasons, not literary ones – and the same is true, as it happens, of the ...”