Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

Description

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to Joyce, Eliot and Pound, it was Pound's personality and position in the artistic world that enabled the experiment to transform itself into an international movement. In 1926 Pound brought together the body of his shorter poems into a definitive collection which would illustrate the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or 'masks', was called Personae. In 1926, Personae's publication gave solidity to a movement; today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century.

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He came to Europe in 1898 and settled in London, where he was to meet Yeats, Eliot, Ford, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1920 he moved to Paris, and later to Rapallo. His acquaintances by now included Joyce, Hemingway, Brancusi, Picabia, Cocteau, Antheil and C. H. Douglas. During the Second World War he broadcast over Rome Radio - for which, eventually, he was tried for treason in Washington. He was committed to a hospital for the insane, where he was held for thirteen years. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy, dying in Venice in 1972.His main publications include The Cantos (I-CXVII), Collected Shorter Poems, Translations, The Confucian Odes, Literary Essays, Guide to Kulchur; Selected Prose and ABC of Reading.