Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (Correspondence of Ezra Pound) [Hardcover]

Ezra Pound (Author), William Carlos Williams (Author), Hugh Witemeyer (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

There is much to absorb from these 169 letters (about 30 percent of the total) between Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. While the process would be aided by having a working familiarity with the lives and writings of each man, the revelations here are unending: of writers and writing, of literary movements, battles, and allegiances, of publishing, and, most particularly, of the principles (artistic and sociopolitical) that governed the sometimes stormy but enduring friendship between these two literary greats. At the core of this friendship?and the letters themselves? was an uncompromising and unromantic love of poetry. Editor Witemeyer's (English, Univ. of New Mexico) efforts make the contents of the letters clear with explanatory notes and editorial insertions while also preserving errors in spelling and punctuation and other forms of deviate expression so essential to the writings of Pound and Williams. Witemeyer also makes it possible to feel rueful when he notes upon Williams's death: "The friendship lasted as long as it could." For academic collections.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Spanning nearly a lifetime, from 1907 to 1963, the friendship between ``Liebes Ezrachen'' and ``Deer Bull'' makes up, in Pound's words, ``two halves of what might have made a fairly decent poet'' divided by ``the wide atlantic ocean.'' Their more than 50 years of animated letters started after a friendship at the University of Pennsylvania, continued through their ties to Imagism, then endured as they pursued their differing yet consonant ideas of poetry. The cosmopolitan Pound took up with expatriate T.S. Eliot (whom Williams detested) and began his inexhaustible Cantos; Williams stayed a suburban doctor-poet, championing American poets such as Marianne Moore and fashioning his own Objectivist poetry. But their always lively postal exchanges, which Williams used in his epic Paterson, extended over serious criticism of each other's work, literary gossip, recommended reading, and arguments over poetry and national identity. The peculiar intimacy of their relationship meant they disagreed repeatedly, but eventually, as this collection illustrates, it was strained by Pound's anti-Semitism and Mussolini worship until the epistolary blackout during WW II, when Pound made his treasonous broadcasts. Although Williams thought Pound was a traitor evading his fate in St. Elizabeth's asylum, their correspondence continued, Pound writing in his eclectic idiolect, Williams responding thoughtfully and at length. Unfortunately, the later scandal over Pound's award for the Pisan Cantos in 1949 and Williams's problems during the Red Scare are absent from their correspondence. Editor Witemeyer (English/Univ. of New Mexico), in addition to contributing useful introductions to each period and a sizeable ``who's who'' appendix, diligently footnotes as many references and allusions as he can (some notes are longer than the letters). A fascinating record, and a double window into the biographies of two major poets. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (May 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811213013
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213011
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,886,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)