Abstract
Dorothy Shakespear’s early reaction to Ezra Pound was not unusual.1 Throughout his life, Pound provoked, disturbed and challenged the status quo, whether in literature, politics or morals. In many ways, of course, this was justified as he threatened, if not overturned, outdated poetic practice, political attitudes, social behaviour and literary reputations, while marshalling the arrival of modernism and the departure of Victorianism. Universities fired him, governments indicted him, poets reviled him and America jailed him. Yet through his instruction of Yeats, promotion of Joyce and editing of Eliot — plus his constant encouragement of writers through essays, editorials, anthologies and letters — Pound had a profound effect on the establishment of modernist writing, although not without controversy.
Ezra! Ezra! … you are (odd) strange — elusive — of other habits of thought than I (shall ever be able to) can understand.
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Notes
Dorothy Shakespear, ‘Notebook, 19 March 1910,’ Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, TheirLetter: 1909–1914, eds Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984) 16. Hereafter, EP/DS.
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© 2004 Ira B. Nadel
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Nadel, I.B. (2004). Introduction. In: Ezra Pound. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378810_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378810_1
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