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.
Books
Diptych Rome-London
1958
Pound/Zukofsky
Selected Letters
1987
Ezra Pound
1983
Cathay
1915
Pound-Joyce
1969
Pavannes and Divagations
1918
Selected Prose 1909-1965
1973
Imagist Poetry
1972
The Confucian Odes
1954
The Spirit of Romance
1910
Jefferson Y/O Mussolini
1935
Des Imagistes
1914
11 cantos
1934
Collected Early Poems
1976
Homage to Sextus Propertius
1934
New Selected Poems and Translations
2010
A Draft of XXX Cantos
1930
ABC of Reading
1934
Collected Shorter Poems
1952
Selected Poems 1908-1969
1975
Guide to Kulchur
1938
Exultations
1909
Posthumous Cantos
2002
Poems 1918-21
Including Three Portraits and Four Cantos
1921
Lustra
1916
ABC of Economics
1933
Ezra and Dorothy Pound
Letters in Captivity, 1945-46
1999
Ezra Pound Reads
2001
In the Station of the Metro (A Poem from The Poets' Corner)
The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family
2008
Ezra Pound Speaking
Radio Speeches of World War II
1978
Hilda's Book
2023
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
1928
A Walking Tour in Southern France
Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours
1992
Early Writings
2005
Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends
Stories in Letters
2008
Selected Cantos
1967
A Quinzaine For This Yule; Being Selected From A Venetian Sketch Book "San Trovaso."
2012
Machine Art and Other Writings
The Lost Thought of the Italian Years
1996
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
1954
The Pisan Cantos
1949
Selected Letters, 1907-1941
1950
Ezra Pound
Early Poetical Works
2015
Personae
The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound
1926
Love Poems of Ancient Egypt
1978
How to read
1931
Gaudier-Brzeska
1916
Early Poems
1996
A Lume Spento
1908
The Cantos
1970
Confucius
The Great Digest & The Unwobbling Pivot
1951
Canzoni of Ezra Pound
1911
