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June 1999

A major's minor: Ezra Pound's poetry

by Donald Lyons

The Pound that matters is early Pound, essentially the Pound of the London years. He arrived in London to stay (he had visited earlier) on August 14, 1908 and within a decade or so of that date had composed most of what is permanently valuable in his enormous oeuvre.

Pound had been a bright and prolific young poet before settling in London. He was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and educated at Hamilton and Penn; Humphrey Carpenter, in his excellent biography, tells of how, back at Penn in 1906 to write a doctoral thesis on the gracioso in Spanish drama, Pound

put his name down for classes in Provençal, Sicilian poetry, the Chanson de Roland, Boccaccio, Dante … and plays by Lope de Vega and his contemporaries … he abandoned it all almost at once, scarcely turning up for anything.
It’s an anecdo ...

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Donald Lyons


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 June 1999, on page 16

Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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