Ira Bruce Nadel

A Literary Life (Literary Lives (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)).)

Ezra Pound

Emmett

'Pound is constantly a challenge, a poet of extraordinary ability and importance but a figure of complex, contradictory ideas, sometimes impossible to tolerate but always teaching us the necessity to understand.' (p. 189)

A moving tribute to a troubled and troubling figure. Careful, thorough, charitable, interesting and, eventually, quietly touching. Being published by Palgrave Macmillan positions it as a scholarly book, but Nadel's biography of Pound is more than that - though the English student will appreciate the extensive passages of close reading. It is wonderfully attentive to his lines, life and work, emphasising judging him by poetic merit but simultaneously readily admitting that difficulty, in the light of Pound's contentious reputation. It seeks to understand his position within the modernist movement and how his involvement as a modernist, his poetic programme and his character may form possible reasons behind his eager adoption of the faulty ideas of fascism (and whether what he really was a fascist or were his political leanings more complicated than they seem). Pound, the enthusiastic, the wild, the uncontrolled, the moralising, the noble crested screamer, eventually captured by silence, losing his grasp on words, his loquacity in old age sadly reduced to fragments and drafts. He is a poet whose direction and interests were infinitely, restlessly changing, his productions thus organically variable ('draft' is a word that often accompanied the Cantos). He veers thematically from chaos to cohesion, condemning cultural destruction while envisioning its revival. What single line can encompass him? Nadel is exemplary as a critic and careful as a reader, perhaps the right reader to handle the poet in his clashing colours without the urge to gloss over the unsavoury or simplify the complex. Consequently, the book gives a poet who is easily misunderstood or refused to be understood (through his glaring faults) a very fair hearing.

The reader's realisation is of Pound as a difficult poet - not just morally, ideologically/politically (which easily inspires negative responses). His mixing of myth, biography, literary form and material from times past - especially in his intimidatingly long series the Cantos - make encounters with him daunting and bewildering for a reader unarmed with preknowledge of his influences and intentions. Yet, perhaps, it may be possible to appreciate points of light in his poetry.

But why is Pound remembered for the postcard-esque lines 'The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough' when there are more poems that attest to his poetic power...

'and to know beauty and death and despair 
and to think that what has been shall be, 
flowing, ever unstill' (Cantos CXIII/807)

'to confess wrong without losing rightness' (CXVI/817)

'That I lost my center / fighting the world
The dreams clash / and are shattered' (CXVII et seq.)

Ezra Pound A Literary Life (Literary Lives (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)).)

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