Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano - Softcover

Tytell, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566635594 ISBN 13: 9781566635592

Publisher: Ivan R Dee, 2004

Synopsis

Unlike other biographical portraits of Ezra Pound, John Tytell's brilliant and ambitious work offers an interpretive study that boldly confronts the emotional truths and psychological drama that formed this complex and controversial American poet. Neither an apology nor a condemnation, it presents instead a meticulous exploration into the mind and vision of a man who galvanized a generation and challenged an entire literary—and world—establishment. Although he enjoyed little fame in his lifetime, Pound's notoriety and influence were enormous, as he arrogantly slashed away at convention and almost single-handedly brought about the twentieth-century revolution in poetry known as modernism. Ultimately, outrage and scandal turned his art to madness, and Pound's last years saw him fall tragically silent.

"The best and most balanced critical biography of Ezra Pound—Tytell maintains a striking balance between the rambunctious man and the gifted poet and tells his story not as an act of judgment but as a searching inquiry into the madness of art."—Leon Edel

"A fascinating figure—and Tytell has written a fascinating book...a vivid, sensitive portrait that will go a good way toward clarifying, for all of us, the enigma that was Pound."—Washington Post Book World

"Exhaustively researched and admirably balanced....[Tytell] has produced an important and a valuable study of literary modernism and its infamous 'midwife.'"—Cleveland Plain Dealer

About this title

About the Author

John Tytell has also written Reading New York, Paradise Outlaws, The Living Theatre, Naked Angels, and Passionate Lives. His work has appeared in the American Scholar, Partisan Review, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He is professor of English at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

It might seem that there is little more to be said about the life and personality of Ezra Pound, erudite poet, editor of The Waste Land, father of imagism and vorticism, helper of Joyce and many other major figures, the man who more than any other set modern poetry on its course. Yet in this incisive interpretive biography, based on interviews with those who knew him and a mass of published and unpublished Poundiana, Tytell examines the circumstances behind the poems and thereby generates new understanding of the man. In particular, he probes the "tragic fracture" in Pound's volcanic personality, those elements of vanity, arrogance and naivete that led him to espouse cranky socioeconomic theories, hero-worhip Mussolini, vilify Jews and Western democracyand after World War II spend more than a decade in a mental institution. Pound's unusual capacity for friendship and generosity was matched by an astonishing capacity for hatred, and the latter marred his Cantos and finally ruined his life. Tytell wrote Naked Angels, a study of the Beat Generation. Photos.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R Dee
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1566635594
• ISBN 13: 9781566635592
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384