Il Miglior Fabbro, The Achievement of Ezra Pound

Abstract

In assimilating briefly a body of literature as large as that of Ezra Pound, the urgent thing is to omit and the feasible thing to work in patterns that suggest more than they encompass. This thesis is planned to operate in that way. Several of the limitations imposed are severe: there is no methodical tracing of Pound's considerable influence on other writers , no systematic account of Pound as a literary critic, little reference to his impressive activity as literary impresario and pedggogue, and only the barest outline of his personal life (hence little mention of Pound ' s treason, his "ins anity" or the Bollingen controversy) . . . The major subject of this paper, then, is Pound's contribution to the art of poetry as shown by his poetic activity through Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), his translation of the Chinese Odes (1954), and such of his critical prose as illuminates this activity. . . . In limiting the subject of the thesis to the art of Ezra Pound I make certain implications. As the term fabbro suggests, most of Pound's work has been on the technical level of poetry. We are concerned, then, with the poet as a craftsman of verse -- not as a philosopher or Freudian specimen. That such a concept of the poet's nature is not denigrating one it is among the aims of this paper to show. Its structure is planned accordingly. [From Forward]