What Ezra Pound meant to me

The memoir about personal meetings with Ezra Pound in Rapallo in 1962 and 1963, at T. S. Eliot’s memorial service in London in 1965, and finally in Venice in the later 1960s, dwells also on the reception of the poet’s work in postwar Britain and in the USA. In the 1960s England largely forgot Pound; his role was historic, his name and his presence faded: in a version of literary history current in British universities in 1960, Ezra Pound figured as “the precursor of Eliot”. In the USA, on the contrary, his breakthrough in modernist poetry as well as his anti-Semitism and admiration for Italian Fascism were well recognized, thanks to the controversy over the award of the Bollingen Prize to Pound’s Pisan Cantos. The memoir shows how a name from literary history becomes a part of personal experience after meeting the man himself, and how it leads to a new understanding of the poet’s legacy – against wider historical, cultural, and literary background. The memoir also provides interesting facts that stimulate reflections on the literary canon, its constant change and flux despite its apparently stable nature.