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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry. Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia." In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
2026
2023
Early Poetical Works
2015
2012
2010
The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family
2008
Stories in Letters
2008
2007
2005
2003
2002
2001
Letters in Captivity, 1945-46
1999
The Lost Thought of the Italian Years
1996
1996
Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours
1992
1991
Selected Letters
1987
1987
1983
1978
Radio Speeches of World War II
1978
1976
1975
1973
1972
1970
1969
1967
1958
1954
1954
1952
The Great Digest & The Unwobbling Pivot
1951
1950
1949
1938
1935
1934
1934
1934
1933
1931
1930
1930
1928
The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound
1926
Including Three Portraits and Four Cantos
1921
1920
1918
