The Pound that matters is early Pound, essentially the Pound of the London years. He arrived in London to stay (he had visited earlier) on August 14, 1908 and within a decade or so of that date had composed most of what is permanently valuable in his enormous oeuvre.

Pound had been a bright and prolific young poet before settling in London. He was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and educated at Hamilton and Penn; Humphrey Carpenter, in his excellent biography, tells of how, back at Penn in 1906 to write a doctoral thesis on the gracioso in Spanish drama, Pound

put his name down for classes in Provençal, Sicilian poetry, the Chanson de Roland, Boccaccio, Dante … and plays by Lope de Vega and his contemporaries … he abandoned it all almost at once, scarcely turning up for anything.

It’s an anecdote prophetic both of Pound’s slapdash ways with languages and of his almost total ignorance of drama.

The atmosphere in which Pound began writing poetry was informed by the Decadent and Pre-Raphaelite aestheticizing of writers like Rossetti, Swinburne, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and early Yeats. Such writing went in for medievalizing and classicizing in attitude and subject matter; poetry was seen as the summoner of an imagined otherwhere, some place of passion, beauty and languorous loveliness totally unlike the ugly quotidian present. Not only is a great deal of Pound’s apprentice work drenched in the diction and Weltanschauungof this late