Any biographer of Ezra Pound needs a clear head, a cool and dispassionate style, and first-rate literary-critical powers. Of David Moody’s two predecessors, Noel Stock (1960) had only the first two, and was inhibited by the control exercised over his work by Pound’s widow, while Humphrey Carpenter (1988) had the first two, but not consistently—his readability coming at the price of some journalistic slickness—and did not pretend to the third. Moody has all three. His book, the first of two volumes, will be a godsend to people like myself, who have spent decades feeling obscurely guilty about their lack of enthusiasm for Pound, and wondering why others, whose judgment they admire, hold him in high regard. If I concentrate here on what Moody says about Pound’s writing, that must not cloud the fact that the purely narrative parts of the book are splendidly done.

The mind of Pound, as it burst upon London in 1908,...

 

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