Poems and Translations

Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature’s modernist revolution. From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except “The Cantos.” In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection “Hilda’s Book” (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 “lost” manuscript. Pound’s influential “Cathay” (1915), “Lustra” (1917), and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet’s own directive to “make it new,” opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, “Poems and Translations” reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound’s tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound’s fascinatingly recondite allusions.