Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano - Softcover

John Tytell has also written Reading New York, Paradise Outlaws, The Living Theatre, Naked Angels, and Passionate Lives. His work has appeared in the American Scholar, Partisan Review, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He is professor of English at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in New York City.

Writing with the ease of a novelist and the precision of a documentarian, Tytell creates a moving and highly readable portrait of that tortured and self-destructive genius, Ezra Pound. Tytell's longest and best-written section deals with Pound's formative years in London (1908-1920). Pound made fruitful contact with Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliotand in the process helped to invent Imagism and the Modernist style in general. Tytell brilliantly exposes Pound's irascible and bellicose nature while maintaining sensitivity for Pound's artistry, particularly his making of the Pisan Cantos. In the end, we are left with the "puzzle of a humanist" who read everything in print while misreading the very world around him. Recommended for all larger collections. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
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