1934 EZRA POUND SIGNED NEW CANTOS XXXI -XLI, FIRST EDITION UNCLIPPED DUST JACKET

1934 EZRA POUND SIGNED NEW CANTOS XXXI -XLI, FIRST EDITION UNCLIPPED DUST JACKET

1934 EZRA POUND SIGNED NEW CANTOS XXXI -XLI, FIRST EDITION UNCLIPPED DUST JACKET

"ELEVEN NEW CANTOS XXXI-XLI" by EZRA POUND. Signed on the title page Ezra Pound. Printed by Farrar & Rinehart Incorporated, Publishers, New York, 1934.

Is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. The first four cantos of this volume (Cantos XXXIXXXIV) quote extensively from the letters and other writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and others to deal with the emergence of the fledgling United States and, particularly, the American banking system. Canto XXXI opens with the Malatesta family motto Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi ("a time to speak, a time to be silent") to link again Jefferson and Sigismondo as individuals and the Italian and American "rebirths" as historical movements. Canto XXXV contrasts the dynamism of Revolutionary America with the "general indefinite wobble" of the decaying aristocratic society of Mitteleuropa.

This canto contains some distinctly unpleasant expressions of antisemitic opinions. Canto XXXVI opens with a translation of Cavalcanti's canzone Donna mi pregha ("A lady asks me"). This poem, a lyric meditation of the nature and philosophy of love, was a touchstone text for Pound. He saw it as an example of the post-Montsegur survival of the Provençal tradition of "clear song", precision of thought and language, and nonconformity of belief. The canto then closes with the figure of the 9th-century Irish philosopher and poet John Scotus Eriugena, who was an influence on the Cathars and whose writings were condemned as heretical in both the 11th and 13th centuries.

Canto XXXVII then turns to Jackson, Van Buren, Nicholas Biddle, Alexander Hamilton and the Bank War and also contains a reference to the Peggy Eaton affair. Canto XXXVIII opens with a quotation from Dante in which he accuses Albert of Germany of falsifying the coinage.

The canto then turns to modern commerce and the arms trade and introduces Frobenius as "the man who made the tempest". There is also a passage on Douglas' account of the problem of purchasing power. Canto XL opens with Adam Smith on trade as a conspiracy against the general public, followed by another periplus, a condensed version of Hanno the Navigator's account of his voyage along the west coast of Africa. The book closes with an account of Benito Mussolini as a man of action and another lament on the waste of war.

56 immaculate pages aged to an ivory colour, faintly darker at the outer margins. No bookplates, No marks, No other signatures. Bound in black linen with silver gilt titling on the spine. The book has very light wear, excellent uniform color from front cover to spine to back cover, gentle pushes to the corners and to the top and bottom of the spine, book sits squarely upright, is tightly bound, hinges work nicely. Book measures 8-5/8 tall x 6-1/4 wide x 1/2 thick or 21.9, 15.9, 1.3cm. The dust jacket has light chipping intermittently along the top and bottom edges, primarily at the spine ends and darkening to the spine, to the creases of the inside flaps, and along the top & bottom edges.

The dust jacket now comes in a new, clear mylar Gaylord protective cover, which is removable. This book comes from the New York City estate of Clare Boothe Luce, Henry Luce, and Henry "Hank" Luce III. Which is one of the last books from our huge acquisition of nearly 2,000 books in 3 sales in 2006 and 2007.

Thank you all for your loyal following and business and friendship these 16 years. His wife was Mary Shakespeare and just some of his closest lifelong friends were T. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Piero Sanavio, Eugenio Montale, Pearl S. Yeats, Dominque de Roux, Edith Sitwell, Wyndam Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, and many others.

Of all the major literary figures in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound has been one of the most controversial; he has also been one of modern poetry's most important contributors. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. Eliot declared that Pound is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual. " Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected in Remembering Poets that "Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry possible in English. " The importance of Pound's contributions to the arts and to the revitalization of poetry early in this century has been widely acknowledged; yet in 1950, Hugh Kenner could claim in his groundbreaking study The Poetry of Ezra Pound, "There is no great contemporary writer who is less read than Ezra Pound.

Pound never sought, nor had, a wide reading audience; his technical innovations and use of unconventional poetic materials often baffled even sympathetic readers. Early in his career, Pound aroused controversy because of his aesthetic views; later, because of his political views. For the greater part of this century, however, Pound devoted his energies to advancing the art of poetry and maintaining his aesthetic standards in the midst of extreme adversity.

In his article "How I Began, " collected in Literary Essays, Pound claimed that as a youth he had resolved to know more about poetry than any man living. In pursuit of this goal, he settled in London from 1908 to 1920, where he carved out a reputation for himself as a member of the literary avant-garde and a tenacious advocate of contemporary work in the arts. Through his criticism and translations, as well as in his own poetry, particularly in his Cantos, Pound explored poetic traditions from different cultures ranging from ancient Greece, China, and the continent, to current-day England and America.

In The Tale of the Tribe Michael Bernstein observed that Pound sought, long before the notion became fashionable, to break with the long tradition of Occidental ethnocentrism. In his efforts to develop new directions in the arts, Pound also promoted and supported such writers as James Joyce, T. The critic David Perkins, writing in A History of Modern Poetry, summarized Pound's enormous influence: "The least that can be claimed of his poetry is that for over fifty years he was one of the three or four best poets writing in English"; and, Perkins continues, his achievement in and for poetry was threefold: as a poet, and as a critic, and as a befriender of genius through personal contact.

" In a 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe, Pound himself described his activities as an effort "to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization. An unsigned review appearing in the May 1909 Book News Monthly (collected in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage) noted, French phrases and scraps of Latin and Greek punctuate his poetry.... He affects obscurity and loves the abstruse.

William Carlos Williams, a college friend and himself a poet, wrote to Pound, criticizing the bitterness in the poems; Pound objected that the pieces were dramatic presentations, not personal expressions. On October 21, 1909, he responded to Williams, It seems to me you might as well say that Shakespeare is dissolute in his plays because Falstaff is... Or that the plays have a criminal tendency because there is murder done in them. " He insisted on making a distinction between his own feelings and ideas and those presented in the poems: "I catch the character I happen to be interested in at the moment he interests me, usually a moment of song, self-analysis, or sudden understanding or revelation.

I paint my man as I conceive him, " explaining that "the sort of thing I do" is "the short so-called dramatic lyric. Pound continued to explore the possibilities of the dramatic lyric in his work, later expanding the technique into the character studies of Homage to Sextus Propertius and Selwyn Mauberley and of the countless figures who people the Cantos. Pound carried copies of A Lume Spento to distribute when he moved to London later that year; the book convinced Elkin Mathews, a London bookseller and publisher, to bring out Pound's next works: A Quinzaine for this Yule, Exultations and Personae. Reviews of these books were generally favorable, as notices collected in The Critical Heritage reveal: Pound "is that rare thing among modern poets, a scholar, " wrote one anonymous reviewer in the December, 1909 Spectator, adding that Pound has the capacity for remarkable poetic achievement.

Flint wrote in a May, l909 review in the New Age, we can have no doubt as to his vitality and as to his determination to burst his way into Parnassus. " Flint praised the "craft and artistry, originality and imagination in Personae, although several other unsigned reviews pointed out difficulties with Pound's poems. His first major critical work, The Spirit of Romance, was, Pound said, an attempt to examine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the medieval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe, still potent in our own. The writers he discussed turn up again and again in his later writings: Dante, Cavalcanti, and Villon, for example.

Pound contributed scores of reviews and critical articles to various periodicals such as the New Age, the Egoist, the Little Review and Poetry, where he articulated his aesthetic principles and indicated his literary, artistic, and musical preferences, thus offering information helpful for interpreting his poetry. In his introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.

Eliot noted, It is necessary to read Pound's poetry to understand his criticism, and to read his criticism to understand his poetry. " Eliot stated in his introduction to Pound's Literary Essays that Pound's literary criticism was "the most important contemporary criticism of its kind. He forced upon our attention not only individual authors, but whole areas of poetry, which no future criticism can afford to ignore. " Around 1912 Pound helped to create the movement he called "Imagisme, which marked the end of his early poetic style.

In remarks first recorded in the March, 1913 Poetry and later collected in his Literary Essays as "A Retrospect, " Pound explained his new literary direction. Imagism combined the creation of an "image"what he defined as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" or an "interpretative metaphor"with rigorous requirements for writing. About these requirements, Pound was concise but insistent: 1 Direct treatment of the'thing' whether subjective or objective 2 To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation 3 As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. These criteria meant 1 To carefully observe and describe phenomena, whether emotions, sensations, or concrete entities, and to avoid vague generalities or abstractions.

Pound wanted "explicit rendering, be it of external nature or of emotion, " and proclaimed a strong disbelief in abstract and general statement as a means of conveying one's thought to others. 2 To avoid poetic diction in favor of the spoken language and to condense content, expressing it as concisely and precisely as possible. 3 To reject conventional metrical forms in favor of individualized cadence.

Each poem, Pound declared, should have a rhythm which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. The original Imagist group included just Pound, H. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, F.

Flint, and later William Carlos Williams. American poet Amy Lowell also adopted the term, contributing one poem to the 1914 anthology Des Imagistes, edited by Pound. In following years, Lowell sponsored her own anthologies that Pound thought did not meet his Imagist standards; and wishing to dissociate himself from what he derisively called "Amygism, " he changed the term "Image" to "Vortex, " and "Imagism" to Vorticism. " Writing in the Fortnightly Review of September 1, 1914, Pound expanded his definition of the image: "a radiant node or cluster, it is what I can, and must perforce call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing. As a much more comprehensive aesthetic principle, Vorticism also extended into the visual arts and music, thus including such artists as the Englishman Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Breska, a French sculptor.

Another important facet of Pound's literary activity was his tireless promotion of other writers and artists. He persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish T. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " calling it in a 1914 letter to Monroe "the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American.

In 1921, he edited Eliot's The Waste Land (published 1922), possibly the most important poem of the modernist era. In a circular (reprinted in Pound's Letters) for Bel Esprit, the well-intentioned but ill-fated scheme to help support artists in need, Pound described the poetic sequence of Eliot's poem as possibly the finest that the modern movement in English has produced. " Eliot in turn dedicated the poem to "Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro" (the better craftsman), and in his introduction to Pound's Selected Poems (1928) declared, "I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most important living poet in the English language. Pound was also an early supporter of the Irish novelist James Joyce, arranging for the publication of several of the stories in Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) in literary magazines before they were published in book form. Forrest Read, in his introduction to Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, reported that Pound described Joyce to the Royal Literary Fund as without exception the best of the younger prose writers. " Read declared that Pound "got Joyce printed" and "at critical moments Pound was able to drum up financial support from such varied sources as the Royal Literary Fund, the Society of Authors, the British Parliament, and the New York lawyer John Quinn in order to help Joyce keep writing. " Richard Sieburth in Istigatios: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourment noted, "Ever concerned about the state of Joyce's health, finances, and masterpiece-in-progress, Pound prevailed upon him to quit Trieste for Paris, thus setting in motion one of the major forces that would make Paris the magnet of modernism over the next decade.

When Joyce and family arrived in Paris in July, Pound was there to help them settle: he arranged for lodgings, and loans... To the future publisher of Ulysses (1922), Sylvia Beach. Other writers Pound praised while they were still relatively unknown included D.

In his Life of Ezra Pound, Noel Stock recalled that in 1925, the first issue of This Quarter was dedicated to Ezra Pound who by his creative work, his editorship of several magazines, his helpful friendship for young and unknown... Comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this generation.

" Included among the tributes to Pound was a statement of appreciation from Ernest Hemingway: "We have Pound the major poet devoting, say, one-fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail.

He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity. Pound's contributions to translation and his rapid critical and poetic development during the Vorticist years are reflected in Cathay (1915), translations from the Chinese. In a June, 1915 review in Outlook, reprinted in The Critical Heritage, Ford Madox Ford declared it "the best work he has yet done;" the poems, of "a supreme beauty, " revealed Pound's power to express emotion... " Sinologists criticized Pound for the inaccuracies of the translations; Wi-lim Yip, in his Ezra Pound's Cathay, admitted, "One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of Chinese studies"; yet he believed that Pound conveyed "the central concerns of the original author" and that no other translation "has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry. " In The Pound Era, Kenner pointed out that Cathay was an interpretation as much as a translation; the "poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry.... Among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I.

Perhaps the clearest assessment of Pound's achievement was made at the time by T. Eliot in his introduction to Pound's Selected Poems; he called Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time" and predicted that Cathay would be called a "magnificent specimen of twentieth-century poetry" rather than a translation. Borrowed with much thanks from The Poetry Foundation online and edited for brevity and relevance. Get Images that Make Supersized Seem Small. Auctiva's Listing Templates improve your auctions in minutes.

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1934 EZRA POUND SIGNED NEW CANTOS XXXI -XLI, FIRST EDITION UNCLIPPED DUST JACKET


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