Personae: The Shorter Poems

by Ezra Pound

Book Overview

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provided (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 which 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081121138X
• ISBN13: 9780811211383
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Artist of the beautiful.

This collection of Pound's earlier poems is the necessary companion of any modern poet. Especially noteworthy, and on display here, is the Pound Rhythm. Pound wrote poetry that embodied its own music. There is much to learn from Pound and in this volume he can be approached without the annotated index that is needed to tackle The Cantos.