Abstract
Between
Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations, …
And expound the distentions of Empire,
But for something to read in normal circumstance?
For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?
I ask a wreath that will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it …
(Collected Shorter Poems, 225)
And
And now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand among these …
(Collected Shorter Poems, 247)
is The Poem. For what passes between the opening and the poem’s conclusion is a set of variations on what a poet should write about, and what avoid, but especially in time of war. These poems, it has been variously debated, are translations; equally, they are Pound’s poems, taking (their) stand. Is it possible for them to be both?
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References
Ezra Pound: Collected Shorter Poems (London, Faber and Faber, 1968 (1952)).
The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London, Faber and Faber, 1975).
ABC of Reading (London, Faber and Faber, 1991 (1951)).
Ezra Pound, ‘Affirmations: AS FOR IMAGISME’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, edited by William Cookson (London, Faber and Faber, 1978 (1973)), pp. 344–7.
Ezra Pound: Selected Letters 1907–1941, edited by D.D. Paige (London, Faber and Faber, 1982 (1950)).
John Speirs, ‘Mr Pound’s Propertius: Homage to Sextus Propertius’ [1935]’, in A Selection from Scrutiny, compiled by F.R. Leavis (Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 101–7.
R.P. Blackmur, ‘Masks of Ezra Pound’, 1933, pp. 78–112, in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York, Doubleday & Company, 1957)
and R.P. Blackmur, ‘An Adjunct to the Muses’ Diadem’, 1946, pp. 113–20, both in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York, Doubleday & Company, 1957).
J.P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius (Austin, The University of Texas Press, 1964).
John Esprey, Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: A Study in Composition (London, Faber and Faber, 1955).
A. Alvarez, ‘Craft and Morals’ [Pound], in The Shaping Spirit (London, Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 48–72.
Wendy Stallard Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980).
Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979).
Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and his World (Literary Lives) (London, Thames and Hudson, 1980).
Jon Silkin, Out of Battle (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 202–6.
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© 1997 Jon Silkin
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Silkin, J. (1997). Ezra Pound. In: The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25351-7_3
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