New Selected Poems and Translations 2e: 1185 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Pound, Ezra; Sieburth, Richard; Eliot, T. S.; Berryman, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217337 ISBN 13: 9780811217330

Publisher: New Directions, 2011

Synopsis

This newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Ezra Pound's Selected Poems is intended to articulate Pound for the twenty-first century. Gone are many of the "stale creampuffs" (as Pound called them) of the 1949 edition. Instead, new emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of original composition and translation within Pound's career. New features of this edition include the complete "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in its original lineation, early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine, and the troubadours, as well as late translations of Sophocles, and the Confucian Odes.

As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parceled out his work to a variety of journals in England, America, France, and Italy. This new edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication. We can observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford's English Review and Harriet Monroe's Chicago-based Poetry, and then as an agent provocateur for the avant-garde Little Review, Blast, and The Dial.

Unlike all previous selections, this volume provides annotation to all the early poems as well as a running commentary on the later Cantos -- indispensable to any reader wanting to follow Pound on his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century. The editor, Richard Sieburth, provides a chronology of Pound's life, a new preface, and an informative afterword, "Selecting Pound." Also included in the appendix are T. S. Eliot's and John Berryman's original introductions to Pound's Selected Poems.

About this title

About the Authors

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: "Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.

Award-winning translator, scholar, and essayist Richard Sieburth has translated books by Henri Michaux, Friedrich Hölderlin, Louise Labé, Gérard de Nerval, and Nostradamus.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the fathers of modernism and a defining voice in English-language poetry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0811217337
• ISBN 13: 9780811217330
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416