Collected Shorter Poems

by Ezra Pound

. 1973 rep, age toning to pages, clean copy

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

281 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cements my idea that in choosing a volume of poetry, one should lean away from "collected" and towards "selected". Dr. Robinson, my most favoritest professor always says "you need to make your own anthology", and Pound reinforces that. I would say something like seventy percent of the poems in this volume were worthless or close to it, but the remaining stuff ranges from interesting to magnificent. He only edges along the really good and never gets comfortable there, but he gets some lines that, as Joyce would say, are like "summons to all my foolish blood."

Bah! I have sung women in three cities
but it is all the same.
I will sing of the sun.

He gets really close to flat out great: he also gave us "in a station at the metro" and we must be thankful for that. "The Ballad of the Goodly Fere" is fantastically imaginative and, to my mind, hugely powerful. Pound is a master of "negative capability" if I understand the term.
In conclusion, my frustration with and grudging admiration of Mr. Pound continue unabated.

[Jen Well-Steered · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm on this half-assed, lifelong quest to read a substantial chunk of the western canon according to Harold Bloom. Bloom thought we needed to read more than novels, so his list includes criticism, plays, short stories, essays, and especially poetry. Some of what he includes is really good literature, others are more like, this is important if you want to understand the evolution of literature. I would definitely put Pound in the important rather than the great.

A few years ago, I tried to read The Cantos but my library only had an un-annotated, un-translated version (and indeed, I'm not sure you can get such a version, or that it would help). So I gave up when I came to the first canto written in another language with no help for the reader. I'm still working through my library's quite scanty collection of classic poetry, and this one came up. I can say that at least this book is mostly written in English, with only a few lines in French, German or Italian.

I'm still not a fan of modernism, though this is early and therefore usually at least approaches comprehensibility. There are a few good poems in here that are funny or satirical, but I don't get much out of the majority of them.