Personae: Revised Edition: Poetry (Revived Modern Classic) - Hardcover

Baechler, Lea; Litz, A. Walton; Pound, Ezra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811211207 ISBN 13: 9780811211208

Publisher: New Directions, 1990

Synopsis

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provides (in Hugh Kenner’s words) “the synergetic presence” to convert individual experiment into an international movement. In 1926, Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection that would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, 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. Pound scholars Lea Baechler (of Columbia) and A. Walton Litz (Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton) have prepared a corrected text and supplied an informative “Note on the Text” explaining both Pound’s original criteria for his selection and the volume’s subsequent history.

About this title

Review

Known for his delicate perception as well as his passionate opinions, Ezra Pound published this, his first collection of poetry, in 1926. Pound was as much a diviner as he was a poet, and his writing is as much observation and experience as it is prophecy. He was especially drawn to beauty and his writing extols the magnificence of profound emotion and the beguiling wonderment of intellect. From translations and reconstructions of pieces of ancient literature to his own postulations on art, love, and life, this is a worthy addition to any personal library.

About the Author

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin’s first letter to Pound, he wrote: “Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of ‘noble caring’ for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US.” Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0811211207
• ISBN 13: 9780811211208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304