Word: pounds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...edge of World War I, Idaho-born Expatriate Ezra Loomis Pound, whose tentative growls had already made him one of the more notable young lions in the literary jungles of London and Paris, sent a manuscript to a Chicago publisher. In the somewhat hectic conditions prevailing for small, avant-garde publishing firms, the manuscript was lost. Not until this year was Ezra Pound's essay Patria Mia accidentally recovered-in a dusty package which had been supposed to contain only old bills. Thirty-seven years behind schedule, the publisher dutifully sent the work to the printers...
American criticism would have suffered no major loss if this essay had forever remained in limbo, but Patria Mia does provide, along with a lot of Pound-foolishness, a cupful of penny-wiseness, winning freshness, a few flashes of brilliance, and some early glimpses of a talented, disorderly mind that was to approach genius before it sank into insanity...
Whitman Abroad. Patria Mia does not sound as if it had been written, but as if it had been talked-between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m.. in a Bloomsbury attic. As with most such nocturnal monologues, which always seem dazzling in the dark, a lot of Pound's dicta could not survive the dawn; but some would stand up at high noon, e.g., his tribute to Walt Whitman: "One may not need him at home. It is in the air, this tonic of his. But if one is abroad; if one is ever likely to forget...
Much of Patria Mia has the unexpected charm of a period piece, because in it the 28-year-old Pound (frequently sounding more like 18) tilts at dragons long since slain and forgotten. At the time of his writing (1913), Pound averred, there was not an artist worth a damn at work in America. "Any pleasant thing in symmetrical trousers" passed for poetry; American literature was pervaded by "magazitis," i.e., the dry rot of the high-toned magazines. Sneered Pound: "It is well known that in the year of grace 1870, Jehovah appeared to Messrs. Harper...
...Pound's essay is more than the customary diatribe by a self-exiled literary rebel against America's cultural bourgeoisie. Years before he turned renegade to his nation to back Fascism, Pound had a profound sense of America's vigor and promise. He could sound paternally tender of its youth ("America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation . . .") and he could grow lyrical, in his strangely dissonant way, over a New York crowd-"a crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd...