What are we to do with Ezra Pound? One answer would be to “cancel” him, to dump his statue in some river and let the water erase it. This wouldn’t be without cause: calling his politics and personality repugnant is an understatement. But it would also be too simple. Pound’s fingerprints are everywhere: most famously on The Waste Land, but also on the careers of Yeats, Frost, William Carlos Williams, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); on the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses; on Imagism, Vorticism, and the “New Poetry” that emerged in Poetry a century ago. He was, inescapably, one of the pivotal figures of twentieth-century literature.
If we have to live with Pound, the necessary question is how: merely as a player in literary history or also as the author of literature still worth reading? Two recent—and very different—works offer their own ways of approaching him. Daniel Swift’s The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound (2017) guides a popular, if highbrow, readership through the decade Pound was institutionalized at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.; while Timothy Billings’s Cathay: A Critical Edition (2019), presents a meticulously researched textual guide to the composition of Pound’s 1915 breakthrough of translations (or “translations”) from Chinese poetry.
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