Collected Early Poems

by Ezra Pound

The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound  contains the complete text, the poet’s first six books, their title pages in facsimile ( A Lume Spento , 1908;  A Quinzaine for This Yule , 1908;  Personae , 1909;  Exultations , 1909;  Canzoni , 1911;  Ripostes , 1912), and the long poem  Redondillas  (1911), for many years available only in a rare limited edition. There are, in addition, twenty-five poems originally published in periodicals but not previously collected, as well as thirty-eight others drawn from miscellaneous manuscripts. Ezra Pound’s 1926 collection, entitled  Personae  after his earlier volume of that name, was his personal choice of all the poems he wished to keep in print other than some translations and his Cantos . It was intended to be the definitive collection of his shorter poems, and so it should remain. Yet even the discarded works of a great poet are of value and interest to students and devotees. Originally, brought out clothbound by New Directions in 1976, the texts were established at the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries of The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They were edited by Michael King under the direction of Louis L. Martz, who wrote the introduction, and Donald Gallup, formerly Curator of American Literature. Included are textual and bibliographic notes as well as indexes of titles and first lines.

Genres: Poetry, American

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Vedis Esenwein · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inredible c0llection of poems from early in his writing career. Worth every second spent reading it.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other reviews are misleading. This collection is everything pre-Cathay, pre-Lustra, which are where Pound comes into his own as, respectively, a translator and a poet. So this isn't even everything excluded from the 1926 Personae. (Not the 1909 book of the same name which is included here in total. Pound disowned that 1909 book but re-used its title for the 1926 edition of his collected poems. To add to the confusion, there are different editions of his selected poems titled Personae as well.)

So if you're looking for all the early poems excluded from the Selected Poems and the New Selected Poems and Translations (as I was), better luck finding those in yet another edition. (Why in the world New Directions is yet to put all the non-Cantos into one volume, as they did with Charles Olson's non-Maximus poems, is beyond me.)

[Simindi · Rating 3 out of 5]

To quote one of the poems,
"Aesthetic phrases by the yard,
It's but E.P. for a' that"

That sums up most of the poems in this collection: very aesthetic, but not much substance. There's a lot of heavy influence from the sources that all his works draw from, such as the Provencal troubadours. The aesthetic is very pretty though and reads nicely, and there are some poems that also stand out in their own right.

[miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

my intro to pound's writing. really liked how he seemed to be experimenting with various styles and meters through his early work. in pieces like cazoni and personae you can sense a passionate artist of great literary knowledge coming into his own, and even challenging conventions in verse at the time.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I was disapppointed in this collection, and quickly realized why. These were not the "favourites" of Pound or the public. Many of the poems are not of the calibre of the Pound I have come to know and love. But still, it is interesting to see the development of his work over time.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a poet, it gives me heart and hope to read these early poems of Ezra Pound, some published, some never published during his lifetime.

Archaic, overly mannered, rich in the thees and thous and eths of pseudopoetic diction, with not much to suggest a great future for this young writer, unless you are studying Pound’s poetic development, these poems may mostly be ignored.

[Mikael · Rating 3 out of 5]

it seems redundant, silly, buying this book when ive already got the library of americas poems and translations and fabers personae but this edition comes with reprints of the original chapbookss covers/frontispieces and im a sucker for these things.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

great, mostly the same as Personae, but with additional goodies