“... as his authority on that subject.* He was all for making it new, but not in quite the same way as Ezra Pound. At one point he too could have produced a reading list of essential books; but as time went by he seemed to care less than he had in his wilder, more assertive days about convincing or converting others. In his early New York years he was much ...”

“... awaited him in America. As Lyndall Gordon nicely says, in her biography of Eliot, both he and Ezra Pound were ‘lapsed professors’. He was working full-time at Lloyds Bank, where he stayed until 1925, and editing the Criterion in the spare moments he didn’t have. This tale of time swallowed up, what Eliot calls ‘the prison-like limitation of ...”

“... muses who inspired his poetry.’ Lowell grew up revering T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (‘I ask you to have me,’ he wrote to Pound as a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by ...”

“... look for in fiction are in important respects poetic. In particular we ask for the quality which Ezra Pound identified in poetry as ‘density’ or ‘thickness’. In the ABC of Reading Pound points out how the German for ‘poems’, Gedichte, is cognate with the word for ‘thick’, dicht. A poet is a maker of ...”

“... hang out with all the sexy Ballet Russes dancers. While in the asylum she scribbled out an SOS to Ezra Pound, signing herself ‘Little Nell’ in letters (another character, Dickens’s doomed girl-heroine, always seeing herself as a fiction). Of course he did nothing to help. None of the Eliots’ friends were really her friends. They all betrayed ...”

“... Who could compare poor Penelope with Gustave Flaubert? Only a poet with the bizarre imagination of Ezra Pound: ‘His true Penelope was Flaubert ...’ – an extraordinary metaphor. Yet the narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot is presented as a man with something like a passion for that chilling novelist, possessively following in Flaubert’s footsteps and ...”

“... to sense in the Frostian way, it’s rare in Kavanagh. The Great Hunger should have had an Ezra Pound to snip it into shape. Occasionally Kavanagh tries to go head to head with Eliot. Section IV opens: April, and no one able to calculate How far it is to harvest. They put down The seeds blindly with sensuous groping fingers, And sensual sleep ...”

“... English falls on evil days. But dons were ever shaky in their taste. Davie himself is nuts for Ezra Pound. It’s not on judgment their careers are based. They tend the fields but they break no new ground. Old Leavis thought that writers could be ‘placed’ Even while they still lived and moved around. Alas, he was so tone-deaf that his scrutiny ...”

“... Bogart, Raft – whose toughness they mirror. With dozens of books on subjects as various as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, geodesic domes and computer poetry to his credit, Hugh Kenner, one of the moving forces behind the California series, is the éminence grise of American Modernism. It is not hard to imagine why he likes cartoons in ...”

“... greatest mistake’: this rang a cracked bell for me. Less than twenty pages later, we bump into Ezra Pound at Mosley’s Black House, along with his pamphlet for the British Union of Fascists, ‘What is Money for’. Pound, who eventually came to contrition’s lockjaw, spoke too of a mistake – his own, which is ...”

“... Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points out, ‘became a model for the heavyweight collections that came after it, household fixtures such as The ...”

“... in flesh-coloured Silk.’ Ever visible, he drifts into other works of art: his cadences return in Pound’s Pisan Cantos; he appears as a blonde in a poem by Frank O’Hara; he becomes the name of a band, the Cocteau Twins. It’s as if he can beam into other worlds, as his voice does, through radio, in his 1950 film Orphée, transmitting from an elusive ...”

“... of a national ‘conscience’ (Joyce’s special definition of the word is not in the OED). When Ezra Pound set out to purify the English language in his Cathay volume of translations from the Chinese, he created a pellucid international English rather than a species of American or British English. This stateless language is an enlightened and ...”

“... younger writers he knew, was directly indebted to him), rarely referred to Ford without contempt. Ezra Pound, a sometimes exasperated admirer, took the fibs less seriously. Allen Tate, the writer closest to Ford in his last years, was also indulgent. Opinion depended to some extent on one’s estimate of the other side of Ford: how much one valued his ...”

“... Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule – ‘Doolittle’ is a surname that invites teasing. Yet it was important to her, too, that the initials, H.D., ‘had ...”