Ezra Pound: Poet - A Portrait of the Man & His Work, Volume II, The Epic Years 1921 - 1939 / A. David Moody
The second volume of David Moody's acclaimed biography offers the first thoroughly comprehensive account of Pound's life and work. Covers Ezra Pound's middle years, weaving together the illuminating story of his life, his achievement as a poet and a composer, and his one-man crusade for economic justice Provides new insight into Pound's complicated personal relationships. This second volume of A. David Moody's full-scale portrait, covering Ezra Pound's middle years, weaves together into a single highly readable and challenging narrative, in a way that has not been done before, the illuminating story of his life, his achievement as a poet and a composer, and his one-man crusade for economic justice. There is new insight into his complicated personal relationships. There are detailed accounts of the composition of his two operas and of his original contribution to the theory of harmony. A canto by canto and decad by decad elucidation of the form and meaning of the first seventy-one cantos of his epic reveals their hitherto unperceived musical structures and their overall design. The thinking behind his support for Mussolini's economic programme during the Great Depression of the 1930s is brought to light, and shown to be not fascist but essentially true to the principles of the American Revolution, and, behind that, to Confucian ideas of responsible government. At the same time it is made clear that he saw only what he wanted to see in Mussolini's Fascism, and later in Hitler's Nazism, and was blind to their darker policies. And it is clear that he went most seriously wrong in deploying, as a weapon in his war on the injustice of the capitalist financial system, the anti-Semitism endemic in Europe and America and at that time turning murderous in Nazi Germany. Pound is revealed as a great poet and a flawed idealist caught up in the turmoil of his darkening time and struggling, sometimes blindly and in error and self-contradiction, to be a force for enlightenment. A third volume will carry on the narrative of his life and works from 1939 to his death in 1972.
Hardcover: 421 pages
Printing / Impression: 1st / 1
Publisher: Oxford University Press (2014
Language: English
Condition: Fine (See Condition Notes)
Condition Notes: 1st edition, 1st print hardcover with unclipped dustjacket both in fine condition. Text and pages clean and unmarked. Black boards with gilt lettering. A nice copy. (Head/Brain Sculpture not included.)