Pound in June 1918.

Unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot was a prophet, once in a way:

The twenty-first century critic will probably be one who knows and admires some of the poems, but who either says: “Pound is primarily a scholar, a translator,” or “Pound’s early verse was beautiful; his later work shows nothing better than the itch for advertisement, a mischievous desire to be annoying, or a childish desire to be original.” There is a third type of reader, rare enough, who has perceived Mr. Pound for some years, who has followed his career intelligently, and who recognizes its consistency.

Eliot wrote this in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, published in 1917, just before the end of the period covered in the first volume of A. David Moody’s biography (reviewed in The New Criterion of January 2008). He was quite right that Pound’s long-term poetic reputation would come to be based, for most readers, more on his early work than the Cantos, which occupied him from 1915 to the end of his life. He could not then know—nobody could—the degree to which Pound would later exhibit much more worrying traits of character than “a mischievous desire to be annoying.” What is certain is that Eliot’s description of the rare “third type of reader” fits David Moody himself with unerring accuracy. We may be thankful for that, because in this second volume he has to confront some exceptionally difficult