'Dates, dates arc of die essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called "Rock-Drill", and the inauguration of the next, called "Thrones".' This is Donald Davie in his introduction to Studies in Ezra Pound, offered as Volume IV of his Collected Works, and including the whole of Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), followed by a single essay from 1972, then 'Six Notes on Ezra Pound' from Trying to Explain (1980 - nowhere actually named in the present volume), and nine essays and reviews written since. Excluded without mention is his 1975 Pound in the Fontana Modern Masters series, a book that mixed some of his best critical insights with strange eruptions of moralising petulance.

LRB 10 October 1991 | PDF Download