Ezra Pound is the supreme ventriloquist of American literature. Over the course of his long and often scandalous career, he turn by turn assumed the voices of a medieval Italian sonneteer of the dolce stil nuovo school, a Confucian sage, a Provençal bard, a Latin erotic elegist, a Noh dramatist, and even that of a transplanted Yankee modernist. Pound restlessly adopted as many guises as “kulchur” in the grandest sense could afford him. If these disparate voices still manage to display a certain shaky coherence, that is only because Pound possessed an unusual gift for the music of words; in the matter of verse he had what could be termed perfect word-pitch. How else, except through his remarkable instinct for verbal cadences, could frontier Idaho, where he was born in 1885, coalesce so improbably with Medici Florence and Han China, how else could the small-town swaggerer on his stump-pulpit conceal the troubadour? And yet, given his cranky and vicious opinions, had Pound not labored with dogged determination to cultivate his gift, he might very well have ended up as a ranting evangelist in a windy revival tent.

Pound’s polyphony carries through all his twenty-six books and constitutes his signature. Of course, the larger, and unavoidable, problem with this most musical of our poets is that he too often donned the ill-fitting mask of the public intellectual; unable to trust his own individual accents, he turned into a cock-eyed purveyor of muddled dogmas. That a poet of such native