The Spirit of Romance

Ezra Pound

Jan 2005 · New Directions Paperbook Book 1028 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

Written in 1910 when Pound was only 25 years old, and later revised by the author, this critical work has long stood as an important stage in the development of Pound's poetics, and a dramatic revaluation of Europe's literary tradition. Pound surveys the course of literature from the fall of the Roman Empire through the dawn of the Renaissance, paying special attention to the Provençal poets and to Dante. Now with an introduction by Richard Sieburth, this work illuminates a great period in European literature and one of America's greatest poetic minds.

About the author

New Directions has been the primary publisher ofEzra 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. Award-winning translator, scholar, and essayistRichard Sieburth has translated books by Henri Michaux, Friedrich Holderlin, Louise Labe, Gerard de Nerval, and Nostradamus."