New Non-Fiction of the Week:
Ezra Pound: The Young Genius, 1885-1920 by A. David Moody. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
In this first volume of a definitive new biography of the poet, Moody charts the huge strides Pound took during his first 35 years toward the realization of his ambitious goal. Readers follow the astonishingly confident-even brash-young Idaho native as he wins his place in a London rich in tradition yet pregnant with revolutionary new literary movements.And no writer has ever ransacked the past-from Dante to Li Po-with fiercer energy in his quest to forge a modern prosody that will make everything astonishingly new. Pound's restless imagination also draws inspiration from contemporaries such as Yeats and Ford and resonates with the ideas propounded by Imagists and Vorticists. Determined to cut his own way, Pound champions the early work of Eliot, Frost, and Joyce, but he never relents in his own pursuit of poetic fame. Moody indeed concludes this volume with Pound's publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, a luminous poem assuring an astonishing world that a gifted artist has found his way onto the world stage.With The Pisan Cantos still ahead, readers will wait impatiently for Moody's second volume. Source: Booklist (December 2007)
