The Companion is a major contribution to the literary evaluation of Pound's great, but often bewildering and abstruse work, The Cantos. Available in a one-volume paperback edition for the first time, the Companion brings together in conveniently numbered glosses for each canto the most pertinent details from the vast body of work on the Cantos during the last thirty years. The Companion contains 10,421 separate glosses that include translations from eight languages, identification of all proper names and works, Pound's literary and historical allusions, and other exotica, with exegeses based upon Pound's sources. Also included is a supplementary bibliography of works on Pound, newly updated, and an alphabetized index to The Cantos.

This book uses Ezra Pound's The Cantos as a lens to understand modernism's ambition to revolutionize literature through mythical and scientific methods. Homer's Odyssey plays a unique methodological and structural role in The Cantos. The Cantos translates, interprets, abridges, adapts, critiques, parodies, trivializes, allegorizes, and “ritualizes” the Odyssey. Partly inspired by Joyce's use of different literary styles or “technics” in Ulysses, and partly inspired by medieval classicism and 19th century philology, Pound uses a plethora of methods to translate Homer and other classical texts. This book argues that The Cantos is a modernist vision of the Matter of Troy, a term used by medieval authors to designate the cycle of texts based on the Trojan war and its aftereffects, including the nostoi (returns) of the Greek heroes. This is the first study to explore how medieval classicism and translation informs Pound's mythical method and to systematically outline the variety and evolution of Pound's Odyssey translations in The Cantos.

This third and final volume of Wilhelm's life of Ezra Pound commences with Pound's departure from Paris at the height of his writing career for Italy, where he hoped to find a quieter life, and it takes him to his death in 1972. It tells how he settled in Rapallo and soon found Mussolini's fascism to be amenable to his own political and economic ideas, especially during the dark days of the Great Depression. As Italy girded itself for World War II, Pound was almost haphazardly drawn into the web, and he foolishly agreed to broadcast on Radio Rome for the Duce, even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. When Italy fell to the Allies, Pound was put first into a dreadful American detention camp at Pisa and then was flown to Washington to be tried for treason. He escaped conviction on grounds of insanity, but he was then remanded to St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he languished for twelve years. Despite the incarcerations, Pound produced during this time some of his most magnificent poetry, including The Pisan Cantos and numerous excellent translations from the Chinese and Greek. He also heavily influenced an entire generation of poets ranging from Robert Lowell to Allen Ginsberg. With the help of Archibald MacLeish and Robert Frost, Pound was eventually freed in 1958. He returned to Italy, where he lived for a time with his wife and daughter. During the final years of his life, he eventually returned to live with his aged lover, Olga Rudge, in Venice and Rapallo. He died in Venice in 1972 and is buried next to Igor Stravinsky, whose work his own strongly resembles, since they both fought for liberation from traditional forms.

Ezra Pound forever changed the course of poetry. The author of a vast body of literature, his enormous range of references and use of multiple languages make him one of the most obscure authors and—because of his Fascism, anti-Semitism, and questionable sanity—one of the most controversial. This encyclopedia is a concise yet comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Included are more than 250 alphabetically arranged entries on such topics as Arabic history, Chinese translation, dance, Hilda Doolittle, Egyptian literature, Robert Frost, and Pound's publications. The entries are written by roughly 100 expert contributors and cite works for further reading. Ezra Pound forever changed the course of poetry. His vast body of poetry and critical works make him one of the 20th century's most prolific writers, and his influence has shaped later poets, great and small. His enormous range of references, deliberate obscurity, and use of multiple languages make him one of the most difficult authors and— because of his Fascism, anti-Semitism, and questionable sanity—one of the most controversial figures in American literary history. This encyclopedia is a concise yet comprehensive guide to his life and writings.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Ezra Pound and Roman Poetry is an examination of a crucial phase in the development of Pound as translator and, therefore, of creative translation in the twentieth century. The book provides a survey of Pound's attempt to appropriate the poetry of Classical Rome, by tracing the histories of the poet's involvement with Horace, Virgil, Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, in order to express his own marginal position within London during the First World War. No extensive critical discussion is attempted, but attention is given to Pound's critical writings on the Latin poets as well as his translations from their work. Dr Davidson also treats other aspects of Pound's problematic relation to the Classical Tradition: the use and abuse of dictionaries; Laforgue and Baudelaire as a third term haunting Pound's translations; the difficult monolith of English classicism; the invention of an oppositional romanitas. It is hoped that this work may encourage others to produce the comprehensive survey which Pound's sustained and Protean relationship to the classical languages would appear to demand. Pound's readings of Latin poetry are inevitably readings also of English poetry, in the context of England, and particularly London, in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

This book is a detailed study of Ezra Pound's explicit and implicit use of elements of the Neoplatonic tradition in his prose and poetry, and of the way it informed his poetics as well as his political and social-economic views. The book not only discusses the ideas of those Pound considered to be leading figures in the development of Neoplatonism (such as Plotinus, Dionysus the Areopagite, Eriugena, Dante, Gernisthus Plethon, and Thomas Taylor), but, more importantly, it shows how and why Pound adapted and appropriated their notions to develop his interpretation of what he saw as an ongoing Neoplatonic tradition. Through this adaptation of Neoplatonism, Pound's work may be seen as an insightful commentary upon this religio-philosophical tradition as well as a contribution to it.