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RR 2005/414 The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia Edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams Greenwood Press Westport, CT and London 2005 xviii + 342 pp. ISBN 0313304483 £71, $125
Keywords Literature, Poetry, Twentieth century
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120510632651
The first paragraph of Tryphonopoulos and Adams' Preface encapsulates the essential problems when attempting to tackle such a controversial, complex figure as Ezra Pound (1885-1972). They write that Pound's "oeuvre is enormous, unmanageable". Pound wore many hats, as an editor "his influence touches hundreds of other writers, great and small. Any serious student of Modern, or twentieth-century poetry and literature in general, must come to terms with him". However, he is "as an author ... notoriously difficult to enter". There is also the problem of "his habit of apparently willful obscurity and use of an array of foreign languages", many of which he probably did not comprehend. "Add to this the notoriety, in his later career of his fascist politics, his funny-money obsessions, his anti-Semitism, and his questionable sanity, and many would-be readers find him simply repellent" (p. xv).
The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia follows hard...