A. David Moody
Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume 1:
The Young Genius 1885-1920.
Oxford University Press, 544 pages, $47.95

Any biographer of Ezra Pound needs a clear head, a cool and
dispassionate style, and first-rate literary-critical
powers. Of David Moody’s two predecessors, Noel Stock (1960)
had only the first two, and was inhibited by the control
exercised over his work by Pound’s widow, while Humphrey
Carpenter (1988) had the first two, but not
consistently—his readability coming at the price of some
journalistic slickness—and did not pretend to the third.
Moody has all three. His book, the first of two volumes,
will be a godsend to people like myself, who have spent
decades feeling obscurely guilty about their lack of
enthusiasm for Pound, and wondering why others, whose
judgment they admire, hold him in high regard. If I
concentrate here on what Moody says about Pound’s writing,
that must not cloud the fact that the purely narrative
parts of the book are splendidly done.

The mind of Pound, as it burst upon London in 1908, seemed
to come from nowhere. His background and elementary
education had been unremarkable, yet his declaration at the
age of fifteen—the year he enrolled at the University of
Pennsylvania—of his ambition “to write before I die the
greatest poems that have ever been written” expressed an
unshakeable purpose. Like Milton, whom he detested, he set
himself to acquire the necessary skills, and allowed nothing
and nobody to obstruct his path. Finding Pennsylvania
wanting, he