Clemson University Press: The Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series – serie

Published in 1938, Guide to Kulchur encapsulates Ezra Pound’s chief concerns: his cultural, historiographic, philosophical, and epistemological theories; his aesthetics and poetics; and his economic and political thought. In its fifty-eight chapters and postscript, it constitutes an interdisciplinary and transhistorical cultural anthropology that exemplifies his slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for current use—“ Make It New.” Though wildly encyclopedic, allusive and recursive, Guide to Kulchur is inescapable in any serious study of Pound. A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges his most far-reaching prose tract presents to the reader. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages in Guide, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the bookis designed to meet the needs of the specialist while keeping the critical apparatus unobtrusive so as also to appeal to students and the general public. A long-needed resource, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur makes a lasting contribution to thestudy of one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the twentieth century.

The project as a whole represents a landmark publication for modernist studies, bringing together, in a ground-breaking format, a number of critical readings of The Cantos by the world’s leading Pound and modernist scholars. In each chapter a contributor approaches either a single Canto or a defined small group of Cantos in isolation, providing a clear, informative, and interpretive ‘reading’ that includes an up-to-date assessment of sources and an idea of recent critical approaches to the work. Most importantly, each essay offers guidance to those wishing to understand the works while contributing to the creation of a new manner of reading The Cantos as a remarkably diverse but coherent work. This first volume illuminates the gestation of the Cantos-technique and includes essays on the most important Cantos and groups of Cantos from the Ur-Cantos (early, discarded versions of the beginning of Pound’s poem), A Draft of XVI Cantos (1924),A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928), and Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI, also known as “Jefferson—Nuevo Mundo,” (1934).

Ezra Pound lived in Italy spanning six decades (1920s to 1970s) and composed here most of his ambitious American and international epic, The Cantos. He largely employed Italian materials: landscapes, artworks, politics, history, people. Bacigalupo’s study approaches Pound’s poetry through its principal physical and cultural background proposing a new and rewarding reading of The Cantos as an account of things seen and noted with a poet’s eye for the striking detail and telling phrase. We visit with Pound his favorite cities and landscapes (Rome, Venice, Rapallo) and encounter some of his foremost Italian peers, associates and translators. Bacigalupo offers readings of important and neglected writings by Pound and shows how he created an autobiographical myth out of his multifarious experience. We get to see the poet at work and are provided with new essential keys to a nuanced understanding of Pound’s lively, tantalizing and contradictory poetic world. This is the first time that so much material concerning a central aspect of Pound’s life and writing has been gathered in one volume.

This volume gathers fifteen essays that offer new interpretations onPound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally.It includes authors from nine different countries and covers Pound’s work fromhis beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of thecentury through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator tothe first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on totranslations of The Cantos spanningthe last fifty years. Although, in our own era, such terms as “cross-culturalthinking,” “globalism,” “transnationalism,” and “internationalism” remain fluidand can often stir controversy in literary studies, especially in discussion ofthe impact of modernism, the place of Ezra Pound as a prominent modernist figureworldwide has remained unquestioned throughout the last century.