“... it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so difficult, perhaps, for the poet who would be inventing ‘Cathay’. Orientalism was also a Late Victorian vogue, and as Martin points out, the ...”

“... within a novel such literature as exists in a different medium. ‘The medium of drama,’ said Ezra Pound, ‘is not words, but persons moving about on a stage using words.’ It is even harder to incorporate such literature as exists in a medium which compounds the difference – not because of music and machines, but because the medium of a masque ...”

“... an exemplary respect for evidence and accuracy. I could fault the book only on a misquotation of Ezra Pound in one of the heroine’s letters – and this girl is scatty about everything except the Finance Act and bed. Sexually, it isn’t trad Crime Club stuff at all, and, while preserving an 18th-century decorum, it even stands Richardson on his ...”

“... but at least the interview has a vividness of its own. ‘My favourite prose sentence by Mr Ezra Pound is in one of his published letters: “All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil.” And they ask me to take that seriously as a Western mind?’ Criticism in Society improves after the Bloom interview, in part because Salusinszky and his ...”

“... think that the ambition of his project demanded such a caricatured, larger-than-life persona – Ezra Pound was a model – and if we accept MacDiarmid at this level we can admire his achievement and enjoy the spectacle of his no-holds-barred style. But this is to enforce a separation between MacDiarmid and Grieve that Grieve himself found difficult, or ...”

“... who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable elections. Of late, however, it has taken to sponsoring lectures and awarding grants and medals, so that after the fierce ...”

“... to borrow from overseas models ... and that runs counter to the mainstreams of British verse. Ezra Pound dedicated Guide to Kulchur to Louis Zukofsky and Bunting – ‘strugglers in the desert’ – and it is in the space between the words ‘disregarded’ and ‘suppressed’ (the ‘struggle’ and the ‘desert’) that the avantgarde project ...”

“... James but also the cultural attitudes of some of his almost immediate successors: Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Co, who seemed similarly indifferent to whether or not their intentions would be understood. Few of our key ‘Modernist’ texts do not partake of James’s umbrage, his angered determination to ‘be one of the few’. And yet, like James, these ...”

“... by the Victorian reviewer E.S. Dallas, that phrase goes back to the troubadours, beloved of Ezra Pound: and there is a troubadour spirit in both these American poets, the collective spirit that Pound did so much to foster. More and more, he appears as the presiding genius not only of ‘Modernism’ but of modern ...”

“... of John Quinn, the New York lawyer to whose patronage the Yeats family, as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, owed so much. Yeats mistrusted ‘the New’, although he knew well enough what was going on; and after what seems to have been a quite serious nervous breakdown in 1915, which held him up for some years, he suddenly began to be serious about oil ...”

“... when he came to write ‘The Wreck’. This is doubly interesting because of the connection with Ezra Pound who, thirty years later would in the same way use Anglo-Saxon as a means of developing the rhythms and the sound of his own verse. Hopkins and Pound were clearly at one on this point: the needs of poetry must ...”

“... watched as she died and which Diaghilev travelled more than once to see. Among many others, Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence also made the trip to Fontainebleau, and Gurdjieff’s teachings dogged Lawrence as far as Taos, another counter-cultural centre. The important point to emerge from this tangled history is that early Modernism was derived not ...”

“... and Amis in his Introduction leaves the reader to ‘speculate’ why he has kept out Shelley and Ezra Pound. ‘Nothing is here because I think it ought to be here.’ He also excludes nonsense. But what is nonsense in poetry? In one of the no-nonsense notes which are an added bonus to his anthology, Amis remarks of Auden’s poem ...”

“... has to be judged according to a system of comparisons and analyses of the kind commended by Ezra Pound in How to Read. Where does that leave the rather tenuous inventions of Bob Dylan, whom Christopher Ricks so much ...”

“... with W.B. Yeats. He knew both Henry James and Tennessee Williams, patronised Masefield and Ezra Pound. Mark Twain wrote a poem about him ... Altogether, Witter Bynner seems too large a person to be discussed merely as an appendage of D.H. Lawrence. This collection of letters (selected from more than seven thousand) represents the fifth volume of ...”