Ezra Pound makes his Penguin Classics debut with this unique selection of his early poems and prose, edited with an introductory essay and notes by Pound expert Ira Nadel. The poetry includes such early masterpieces as “The Seafarer,” “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and the first eight of Pound’s incomparable “Cantos.” The prose includes a series of articles and critical pieces, with essays on Imagism, Vorticism, Joyce, and the well-known “Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” First time in Penguin Classics - Includes generous selections of Pound's poetry, as well as an assortment of prose "The best of Pound’s writing... will last as long as there is any literature." —Ernest Hemingway "…We all owe a great deal to him. But I most of all surely." —James Joyce Ezra Pound (1885–1972) is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. Ira Nadel, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is the author of Ezra Pound, A Literary Life and the general editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound . Ira Nadel, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is the author of Ezra Pound, A Literary Life and the general editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound . Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction   POEMS THE CANTOS - (1917-1922) PROSE   Explanatory Notes Index of Titles and First Lines FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE PENGUIN CLASSICS EARLY WRITINGS       EZRA POUND, poet, essayist, editor, translator, anthologist and literary provocateur, was one of the major modernists of the twentieth century. Born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College, then briefly taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, before heading to Europe in 1908 and settling for a time in Venice, where he published his first book, A Lume Spento. He then moved to London, where he continued to write and met such authors as Yeats, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, and T. S. Eliot. In late 1920 he and his wife, Dorothy—they had married in 1914—moved to Paris, but not before he guided movements like Imagism and Vorticism to prominence and aided writers like H.D. and Joyce in getting their early works published. In Paris, Pound met the American violinist Olga Rudge, who would become his companion for almost fifty years, and continued to work on his long poem, The Cantos, which he had begun in 1917. He also edited Eliot’s The Waste Land and became friendly with Picabia, Brancusi, Duchamp, Cocteau, and Ernest Hemingway, while working on an opera, Le Testament, based on the work of François Villon. In 1923 he visited Rimini and became absorbed by the life of Sigismundo Malatesta and his Tempio, which would prompt the Malatesta Cantos, numbers VIII-XI of his long work. He continued to publish criticism and visit Italy, where he and Dorothy, and then Olga, moved in 1924, settling in Rapallo and Venice. At the same time, prose works like the ABC of Economics (1933) and Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), became increasingly economic and social in outlook. Pound remained in Italy the rest of his life, except for two trips to the United States: the first, in 1939, was an aborted attempt to visit President Roosevelt and several congressmen to prevent U.S. involvement in World War II; the second, in 1945, occurred after his arrest for treason at the end of the war following his anti-American broadcasts on Italian radio. Declared to be mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained from 1946 to 1958, during which time he continued to write. In 1949, he won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos, which he began while at a U.S. Army detention camp in Pisa, Italy. Following his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound returned to Italy, where he wrote sporadically. He died in Venice on November I, 1972.   IRA B. NADEL, educated at Rutgers and Cornell universities, is professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His books include Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form; Joyce and the Jews; Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen; Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard; and Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. He has also edited The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson and the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. PENGUIN BOOKS   Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin