Pound remains one of the most significant and influential poets in English in the twentieth century. This collection provides a guide to his early experiments culminating in the original three cantos (later drastically revised). Although an unrepentant modernist this collection shows the extent of his perhaps rather achaic diction in many of the early poems. In some ways some of these poems seem slightly more romantic and imprecise than those of more traditional poets working at the same time such as Hardy. Nevertheless, Pound was always an inveterate experimentalist and this can be seen in his exploration of verse form: he works through a series of distinctive styles and genres, imitating his much favoured troubadours, adopting voices and personae in the manner of another hero, Browning. The different modes of his work are all incorporated here - the imagist poems, brief and compressed, the best powerfully evocative of intense moments as seen in "In a Station at the Metro"; the adaptations and translations which reconstruct the Roman Sextus Propertius' oblique criticism of his culture in a modern setting often to great effect; the massively influential Chinese poems of the "Cathay" sequence which provide in many ways the most telling evidence of Pound's desire to get beyond traditional conceptions of iambic rhythm; and finally the brilliant but sometimes inscrutable "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" sequence, an energetic and scornful dismissal of British cultural complacency in the face of both the destructive and productive tides of the modernism that Pound went on to advocate. This is a collection which is of immense importance but Pound's programmatic and sometimes intemperate explorations for all their creativity do lack the kind of warmth of some of his contemporaries. ( )

As a catalog of Grandpa's early stuff, it's reliable. If interested in how he got to The Cantos, very fine. Could rely less on Pound's own discrimination and expand to include much of the shorter stuff. A lume Spento, A Quinzaine For This Yule, and later imagist stuff from BLAST,etc. Overall a solid representation of Pound's early
efforts. ( )