A Revolutionary Simpleton

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Ezra Pound: Poet Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920
by A David Moody.

Pound's early life story is in some respects not unlike that of T. S. Eliot, the man who in his dedication to The Waste Land called Pound "il miglior fabbro" (which can mean either "the better writer" or "the better craftsman"). They shared the same desire to escape from provincial gentility in America to Europe and perhaps especially to England, the same struggle to convince parents and family that the effort was one worth endorsing and financing, the same quixotic belief that poetry could be made to yield a living and that poets were a special class, and the same register of annihilating shock when in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.

It is always impressive to read of the sheer dedication and conviction with which Pound approached poetry, and of the immense hopes he entertained for its regenerative powers. In a single season between 1912 and 1913 in London, we find him taking up the Bengali master Rabindranath Tagore and advising the Irish genius Yeats. Moody writes:

The measures, melodies and modulations of the songs in their original Bengali, which he had Tagore sing and explain to him, interested him as a seeker after 'fundamental laws in word music' and seemed to correspond to the sort of metric he was working for in English. He went on to wax enthusiastic about the prospect of Bengali culture providing 'the balance and corrective' to a Western humanism which had lost touch with 'the whole and the flowing'. 'We have found our new Greece', he declared. 'In the midst of our clangor of mechanisms'.

More here.