Customer Reviews

Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, With Pound's Critical Essays and Articles About Joyce

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Within these three hundred elegantly published pages from New Directions we may come to understand how Ezra Pound served as brilliant and talented midwife and nursemaid of the modernist literary movement, including editing TS Eliot's Wasteland, cutting out the waste and leaving the essential, creating the epic poem we now study. Herein we may read Pound serving in every way the ground breaking literary creations of Mr. James Joyce, leaving him only after the early writing of Finnegans Wake.

Clearly without Pound we would have no Joyce, as Pound served as aggressive literary agent, as encouraging force for Joyce, as clarion critic and publicist, creating each of these positions long prior to their cynical establishment within the present corporate literary industry. The brilliant writings by Pound published by New Directions within this comprehensive volume, with excellent introduction and commentary by Forrest Read, serve to prove the debt world literature owes Mr. Pound, who at the expense of his own writing served other writers so completely.

This work serves as encouragement and reinforcement for any struggling writer battling against his or her muse, as the words Pound sends Mr. Joyce here may strengthen and comfort each writer entering upon new and uncertain ground. Please notice the subtitle states "The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce" as despite the main title we find only three letters from Mr. Joyce included, as so much went missing in action. The life of Mr. Pound, despite serving as secretary to Mr. Yeats, did not provide for preservation of correspondence, particularly late in his life when the US government imprisoned him within a mental institution for years. In fact for further study of that interesting phenomenom, the reader would do well to consider the book Joyce and the G-men, regarding J Edgar Hoover's cultural war on the modernist movement, which destroyed even the great American novelist James Wright.

Great. My mother never had an inkling to care for neither Joyce nor Pound (the extensiveness they procure). She's flicked through these letters and, looks like i might eventually have somebody to discuss these two Greats with, here at home...