Diptych Rome-London presents the two undisputed masterpieces of Pound’s pre-Cantos work––the long poems ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ and ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.’
Created in the aftermath of World War I, the poems ironically consider the place of the artist in ‘a botched civilization.’ ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ (1917) is a free translation from the Latin, an homage to the Roman poet; praising its ‘enormous freedom and range of tone, ‘ Hugh Kenner remarked that ‘few more original poems exist in English.’ ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’ (1920) is described in A. Walton Litz’s clear and helpful introduction as a ‘master document of literary modernism.’ It was also T.S. Eliot’s favorite Pound poem: ‘I am quite certain of ‘Mauberley, ‘ whatever else I am certain of… a great poem, a document of an epoch.’
Circa l’autore
New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin’s first letter to Pound, he wrote: “Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of ‘noble caring’ for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US.” Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.
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