First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound's understanding-it is fair to say, his appropriation-of the text. Fenollosa's manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North Americaand East Asia.Pound's editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa's encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry.This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa's important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound's deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa's sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa's ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition.This masterfully edited book will be an essential resource for scholars and poets and a starting point for a renewed discussion of the multiple sources of American modernist poetry.

La poesia di Ezra Pound è segnata dall'interesse per la storia, che diventa una vera passione trascinante quando tocca gli snodi della sua patria statunitense. Secondo l'autore dei 'Cantos', le vicende umane sono invariabilmente segnate dalla tensione tra giustizia e speculazione, tra sfruttatori e forze del lavoro. È stato proprio il culto del denaro a corrompere i costumi imponendo leggi inique: 'L'usurocrazia fa le guerre in serie. Le fa secondo un sistema prestabilito, con l'intenzione di creare debiti'. In opposizione al sentire dominante, Pound individuò in Thomas Jefferson e in John Adams due modelli di statisti realmente interessati al bene comune. Entrambi infatti sancivano il principio che il denaro dovesse appartenere al popolo e dovesse essere amministrato nel suo esclusivo interesse. Il saggio poundiamo è un richiamo per riscoprire due figure ingiustamente cancellate dalla storia, ma, in senso più ampio, è un monito per destare interesse sulla ricerca della vera cultura e non sul suo surrogato imposto dalla dilagante speculazione.

Inedite in Italia, e su autorizzazione degli eredi di Ezra Pound, sono raccolte in questo volumetto alcune brevi prose memoriali del viaggio che il giovane poeta intraprese nel Sud della Francia sulle tracce dei trovatori medievali che tanta influenza avranno anche nei suoi celebri 'Cantos', il poema di una vita che lo consacrerà come uno dei più grandi poeti innovatori del Novecento.

These ideas first saw print in 1910, when they served as a series of lectures in London. Pound was then just 25, freshly fired from his first and only academic post, and already had four volumes of poetry in the bookstores. Nevertheless he wanted to make a name for himself as a maverick critic, so here he established a pattern of cultural beginnings and re-beginnings from Roman times through the dawn of the Renaissance. He began with the transition from Latin to the romance languages and proceeded to troubadours, Northern France, the Chanson de Roland, Dante and his precursors, El Cid, the Renaissance Latin poets, the plays of Lope de Vega and The Lusiads, all very good names indeed. The result is a new sorting of literary movements that no doubt startled those London literati who attended his lectures. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was 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 book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time. The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers.

Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature's modernist revolution. From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except The Cantos. In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection Hilda's Book (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 'lost' manuscript.

Pound's influential Cathay (1915), Lustra (1917), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to 'make it new,' opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, Poems and Translations reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound 'the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.'

An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.

I «Canti postumi» costituiscono una scelta basata su criteri poetici. L'opera, suddivisa in capitoli, percorre l'intero arco di tempo che va dal 1917 fino alla morte del poeta nel 1972 e comprende anche una sezione di versi scritti direttamente in italiano tra il 1944 e il 1945, vero e proprio preludio ai «Canti pisani».

A reissue of the 1916 publication (London, Macmillan) in which economics professor Fenollosa and poet Pound explain to westerners the Japanese dramatic form that began in the 14th century. They trace the history, explore the nuances, and present excerpts from the approximately 240 plays that remain in the repertoire. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: 'They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry.' William Carlos WIlliams said '[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them.'

Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

Sono qui raccolti i principali scritti di Pound 'economista' che presentano il corpus articolato di una riflessione condotta nel corso degli anni Trenta da posizioni sì moralistiche, ma non prive di riscontro presso i monetary cranks, quegli economisti eretici rispetto ai quali fu costretto a prendere posizione lo stesso Keynes. Come mostra Giorgio Lunghini, nel suo saggio introduttivo, la premessa etica di Pound, la sua 'filosofia sociale', non è molto lontana da quella di Keynes, certo tenuto a un più professionale realismo, in particolare quando si tratta di affrontare il problema della disoccupazione. In appendice due articoli apparsi nella rivista di T. S. Eliot 'Criterion' e una selezione dei discorsi di Pound alla radio fascista pronunciati durante la guerra. Con la prefazione di Mary de Rachewiltz e l'introduzione di Giorgio Lunghini.

I testi di Francesco d'Assisi accompagnati dai 'pensieri sull'amore' di Riccardo di San Vittore, con l'interpretazione grafica di Osti, per una interiore e religiosa esperienza artistica.

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 Arnaut 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. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of 'Walking Tour 1912,' editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound's footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. 'What this peripatetic editing process...revealed,' he writes, 'was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound's gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet....'

An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. 'A Draft of XXX Cantos' (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos' essential themes and provides the surest entry into Pound's encyclopedic masterpiece.

Presents Pound's version of Sophocles' play and discusses its background