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A quinzaine for this Yule;: Being selected from a Venetian sketch-book "San Trovaso."
Well printed edition done in 500 copies. 27, 3 pages. stiff paper wrappers, cord-tied.. small 8vo..
- GenresPoetry
27 pages, Unknown Binding
First published February 6, 2012
About the author
Ezra Pound
491 books906 followersEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 5, 2021
I picked up this 1984 reproduction (printed by the University of Virginia Press) of Pound's 1908 chapbook. I tend to prefer what immediately followed — Pound's deeper journey into modernism, his legendary poems in the April 1913 Poetry, including "A Pact" ("I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—/I have detested you long enough") and "In a Station of the Metro."
But this collection is still moving, and that poetic diction that comes across as though it were from forgotten psalms is here in full flower, if somewhat more verbose and less fragmentary than it would become. And the physical edition is a thing of beauty.
But this collection is still moving, and that poetic diction that comes across as though it were from forgotten psalms is here in full flower, if somewhat more verbose and less fragmentary than it would become. And the physical edition is a thing of beauty.
March 12, 2022
Beautiful
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews