Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

[xiv], 281, [1] pp. 8vo. "If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provided (in Hugh Kenner's words) "the synergetic presence") to convert individual experiment into an international movement. In 1926 Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection which would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or "masks," was called Personae. In 1926, Personae's publication gave solidity to a movement today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century." "Here we find the beautiful early lyrics and poems in the vein of the Provencal Troubadours, the satiric verse of the London period, the matchless translations from the Chinese (Cathay), the extraordinary 're-creation' of a Roman poet (Homage to Sextus Propertius), and the Mauberley sequence, the finest work of Pound's middle years and one of the great monuments of modern poetry."