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These fascinating letters capture the most traumatic experience of Ezra Pound's life, when he was incarcerated at the end of World War II and indicted for treason. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo have collected and edited the unpublished correspondence between the poet and his wife, combining it with ...

These fascinating letters capture the most traumatic experience of Ezra Pound's life, when he was incarcerated at the end of World War II and indicted for treason. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo have collected and edited the unpublished correspondence between the poet and his wife, combining it with military and FBI documents, previously unknown photographs, and an extensive, insightful introduction, to create the definitive work on this period of Pound's life. During his incarceration in a U.S. Army detention camp outside Pisa, Pound was allowed to write only to his wife, so these letters afford a unique look at a painful yet highly productive period, when Pound wrote his acclaimed Pisan Cantos and worked on his translations of Confucius. Readers will discover many fresh insights into the sources and contexts of the Cantos and the circumstances of their composition. Here, too, are many moving passages testifying to Pound's partnership with Dorothy and her courageous efforts to help him; her experiences no less than his come to life in this volume. But perhaps the most moving are the harsh conditions Pound found himself in: at one point, in the Pisan camp, he was confined for three weeks in an open air cage, until the sixty year old poet suffered a breakdown and was moved to a tent in the medical compound. The editors connect the anxious lyricism of the Pisan Cantos to these dramatic experiences, as the poet alternated "between savage indignation and suave serenity." The book also covers Pound's return to the United States and his confinement in a federal mental institution there. With more than 150 previously unpublished letters and documents, all authoritatively annotated, Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945 1946, offers a rare glimpse into the life and work of one of our century's greatest literary figures.

A Gift Imprisoned is a tale of the two lives, of Matthew Arnold: as young man and impassioned lyric poet, and, in his maturity, his poetic ambitions long-since quelled, as Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic.

By age forty, Arnold's poetic life was ...

A Gift Imprisoned is a tale of the two lives, of Matthew Arnold: as young man and impassioned lyric poet, and, in his maturity, his poetic ambitions long-since quelled, as Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic.

By age forty, Arnold's poetic life was effectively over, at which time he began to devote his energies to "purposeful" prose composition. As the eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, the most celebrated headmaster in England and the great shaper of Victorian morality, Arnold saw his future as inescapable. As W. H. Auden wrote, Arnold "thrust his gift in prison till it died". For about twenty years, however, Arnold made efforts to resist his destiny as a social moralist. A Gift Imprisoned is the story of that losing battle. Why did Arnold abandon an extremely promising poetic life? Was it Victorian repression, Arnold's fierce love of duty, or was he crippled by insufficient faith in his own talents? These questions lead Ian Hamilton through beautifully reasoned considerations on the nature of creativity and its silencing

Some of Us Did Not Die Brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining ...

Some of Us Did Not Die Brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.