In this essential guide to one of the most difficult yet rewarding poems of the twentieth century, William Cookson (who began corresponding with Pound as a schoolboy in 1957) draws on a deep and intimate knowledge of Pound's life and work. This edition incorporates much new information and has been substantially revised and expanded. William Cookson gives lucid critical overviews to the various sections of the poem, clarifying its purpose and structure and explaining the views on literature, history and economics that inform Pound's poetry. His detailed commentary on each canto addresses the major stumbling-blocks for readers by translating foreign phrases, identifying quotations and explaining allusions.

Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound

Literature & Fiction

Cookson, William

History & Criticism

Persea Books

Discusses the themes of Pound's major work, explains its foreign phrases, quotations, and allusions, and includes statements made by Pound about his poetry

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Lamplighter Titles)

Discusses the themes of Pound's major work, explains its foreign phrases, quotations, and allusions, and includes statements made by Pound about his poetry

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound

Classics

Discusses the themes of Pound's major work; explains its foreign phrases, quotations, and allusions; and includes statements made by Pound about his poetry.

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition

Persea

Agenda, one of the longest-lived and most distinctive 'little magazines', was founded in 1959 by the young William Cookson, as a result of meeting Ezra Pound the previous year. This anthology presents a broad-ranging selection of the many arresting and important contributions which have appeared in Agenda. The book is divided into: antecedents, contemporary poetry, criticism, memoirs, and polemics. Among the many major poets who choose to publish in Agenda despite its modest circulation we find Geoffrey Hill, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney and Tom Scott.Other items of major importance in the anthology are David Jones's long poem 'The Sleeping Lord' which the poet completed for the first David Jones issue (1967), two uncollected drafts of Pound's Cantos, T.S. Eliot's 'Scylla and Charybdis', a lecture that first appeared in the T.S. Eliot issue (1985).Cookson combines a commitment to contemporary work with special numbers reappraising crucial figures in his Modernist firmament: Pound, Bunting, David Jones, Zukofsky. He has kept an attentive eye on the classics, and on the Moderns in languages other than English - notably Cocteau, Mandelshtam and Ungaretti. For Cookson the legacy of Modernism is vital; it has not been displaced by reaction or the post-modern but remains an enabling challenge, in the present.

Agenda: An Anthology : The First Four Decades (1959-1993)

United States

Sheep Meadow Pr