“... 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 ...”

“... to launch his career as a poet. This was the course recommended by his new friend and admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had shown some of his work. Europe, Pound could testify, was the best, the only place for any American aspirant to literary or artistic preferment. If you can make it there, he insisted, you can make ...”

“... Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a ...”

“... one can claim with some plausibility that the bridge from Maoism to Americanism was called Ezra Pound); finally, there was the pilgrimage to revolutionary China itself in spring 1974, from which the group, along with Barthes, return chastened and relatively uncommunicative. The falling away from Maoism was thus relatively undramatic, as though no ...”

“... an imagist precision that can come only out of a full submission to the phenomenal world. Sandy is Ezra Pound with the power off. You feel that Humphries himself remembers what it was like to be allowed to lick the egg-beater and bowl. To the extent that Sandy exists on the intellectual plane at all, he is the kind of dimwit who takes anti-semitism for an ...”

“... Phoenician, or tilled his blood into his rose garden. Bloom’s American canon does not include Ezra Pound (barely mentioned), let alone Charles Olson or Ed Dorn, and Frank O’Hara is just one of the ‘comedians of the spirit’. Among novelists, Bloom had no time for John Updike’s sharp analyses of suburban excess (he is accused of ...”

“... that disregards Wyatt and Campion and Pope before it as certainly as, after it, it disregards Pound and the young Eliot. Such blank verse – the unrhymed, relentlessly regular pentameter – can be squeezed out like toothpaste, ignoring the audibie shape of any one verse-line or run of lines, because we are supposed to be attending to larger and more ...”

“... too much thinking about it. Of course, much thought has gone into this impression of less thought: Ezra Pound commented on Hardy’s way of keeping his mind on his subject-matter, and ‘how little he cared about manner, which does not in the least mean that he did not care about it or had not a definite aim’. So frosty grass rustles ‘like ...”

“... aesthetics was the somewhat mysterious doctrine of the ‘Vortex’, a word he had picked up from Ezra Pound to describe the Blast ideal of energy and tough-mindedness: ‘The Vorticist does not suck up to Life. He lets Life know its place in a Vorticist Universe!’ The thrill of the Vortex didn’t last very long, but the same impulse shaped later ...”

“... find not only traces of Hardy’s real autobiography but of our own. It was Hardy’s antithesis, Ezra Pound, who said: ‘No man can read Hardy’s poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true ...”

“... to suspend normal expectations and confront the novel’s seeming (and actual) repetitions. Ezra Pound thought it inaugurated ‘a new form which had no precedents’. There is a story about Schoenberg showing his violin concerto to Jascha Heifetz, who told him that in order to play a certain passage he would need to grow a sixth finger, to which ...”

“... adept, but there was also more than a dash of the village explainer in him, and – as was said of Ezra Pound, another with this trait – that was all right if one were a village and not if not. As far as the art of turning journalism into successful books was concerned, the end of the 1930s marked something of a golden period for Wilson. In 1938 he ...”

“... by authoritarian rhetoric, he had the susceptibility of such contemporaries as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound to the politics of hatred. His infamous lines in ‘The Statues’ about the ‘filthy modern tide’ and its ‘formless, spawning, fury’ have the same period excess as D.H. Lawrence’s declaration: ‘To learn plainly to hate mankind, to ...”

“... on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of A Strong Song Tows Us and the New Directions Complete Poems, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggle-toothed, twinkling-eyed dome he presented as an ...”

“... that matters comes from books, not parents. Often Modernist poets seem embarrassed by Mum and Dad: Ezra Pound’s father, Homer, is displaced by his son’s epic poem. Pound is his own hero, lonely and supermannish. One has to turn to his biography to realise how much MacDiarmid’s family sustained him as he wrote such ...”