“... Ulysses, Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole and his great verse-play At the Hawk’s Well, Ezra Pound’s Cathay and ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ and Eliot’s quatrain poems. None of these four writers allowed the war to deflect them in their poetic career, nor was there any reason why they should have done, seeing that they were not of ...”

“... mistake. When she arrived in New York City in 1934 to meet Zukofsky, she had been familiar with Ezra Pound’s work, along with assorted strands of Modernism, for more than a decade. She was 31 and had studied literature at Beloit College, a small liberal arts college not far from Fort Atkinson, for two years (1922-23), worked at the Fort Atkinson ...”

“... seaman on the George Weems, bound for Liverpool, a merchant vessel carrying a cargo of 500-pound bombs. Burroughs worked his way through Proust and stared at the Mississippi while waiting for an honourable discharge from the army. Ferlinghetti saw action at the Normandy landings, commanding a submarine chaser. Transferred to the Pacific, as navigator ...”

“... which is aggressively sumptuous and self-satisfied: large, beautiful and as inappropriate as a 5.4-pound souvenir added to an infantryman’s pack.)* We are in the sky, as the jungle is painted with napalm; in Washington DC, studying maps with optimistic generals; at home waiting, when American day is night in Vietnam; on the ground, as desperate dots struggle ...”

“... Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used against Whitman in his essay on Pound: ‘Whitman was a great prose writer.’ His originality ‘is spurious in so far as Whitman wrote in a way that asserted that his great prose was a new form of verse.’ As one who has fallen short of poetry, then, Kipling is in the best possible ...”

“... in 1914 and A Portrait of the Artist would be published at the end of 1916. In that same year Ezra Pound, seeking a Civil List pension for Joyce from the British government, had sent his books to Asquith’s secretary, who wrote to Yeats and George Moore asking for their views.A year before, when Yeats had raised the matter with Edmund Gosse, he had ...”

“... perhaps because there is still no accounting for such things in the way we talk about poetry. Ezra Pound’s idea of logopoiea – ‘doing things with words’ – had, I think, little to refer to at the time it was coined. I never quite ‘saw’ or believed his instances, in Propertius or Corbière, though I never doubted the ...”