This newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems is intended to articulate Pound for the twenty-first century. Gone are many of the “stale creampuffs” (as Pound called them) of the 1949 edition. Instead, new emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of original composition and translation within Pound’s career. New features of this edition include the complete “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in its original lineation, early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine, and the troubadours, as well as late translations of Sophocles, and the Confucian Odes.…

Dating from 1910 and subtitled “An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe,” The Spirit of Romance is one of the key books in Ezra Pound’s revaluation of literary tradition. Pound gives us first the background of the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, then deals with the Provençal Troubadors, notably Arnaut Daniel; the medieval narrative poetry of Northern France; the Chanson de Roland; Dante and his precursors, such as Guinizelli and Cavalcanti; the Spanish epic of El Cid; Villon; Renaissance Latin poets; the plays of Lope de Vega; and Camoens’ Portuguese epic The Lusiads.…

Mary de Rachewiltz’s autobiographical account, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher, which first appeared as a New Directions Paperbook in 1975, is now reissued with a new afterword by the author. Set against the background of Fascist Italy and the Tyrolean Alps where she spent the early years of her childhood, the story Ezra Pound’s daughter movingly reveals is a side of the poet which is seldom touched upon, that of devoted father, and at the same time serves to illuminate many of the more difficult, personal passages of The Cantos.…

Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos were written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth hook of his modernist epic, The Cantos, itself conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time.…

Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Amaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos.…

The one-eyed singer, songwriter, and knight errant Oswald von Wolkenstein (surname literally “Cloud-Stone”) was among the last of the great troubadours. A contemporary of Villon, versed in Petrarch, and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, Wolkenstein was lost to history until scholarship in the 1970s recognized him as the German language’s first genuinely autobiographical lyric voice. In the hands of the magician-translator Richard Sieburth, working in the spirited tradition of Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn, Wolkenstein’s verse rises from the page like a medieval Bob Dylan.…

Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang’s La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world’s oldest living language.…