Meeting Ezra Pound - Rated 
Ezra Pound: Poet (v 1) is a gift for any reader who wishes to be introduced to Ezra Pound's poetry and/or would like to discover Pound as a character. A vast amount of finally detailed research is woven into a skilful web that reflects individuals, the literary elite of England and America and the impact of the outbreak of the First World War
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A bug that took my energy away created a happy opportunity to drop everyday constraints and devote my whole attention to this wonderful book. The general impression, especially when perusing the last two thirds, was of sailing a wide sea in a favourable wind, full blast. A delight!
Professor Moody's book brings Pound to life in a startling fashion, his feelings, thoughts, words, literary contacts, friends, his struggles, single-mindedness and his merciless tongue. A first impression is of a spoiled brat - not a specially desirable acquaintance - but as the story unfolds, Pound's total dedication to poetry, a certain uncompromising honesty, his generosity towards the few artists he esteems, his rejection of the money world and condemnation of capitalism, his biting humour and capacity to mock himself as well as others make of him an endearing character, life-seeking, provoking, invigorating.
Since Pound's death his poetry remains, a standing tribute to the poet, and now this biography resurrects him as a person intimately and fully. An unusual achievement!
Familiar with a few, much loved poems of Pound's - one favourite being The River-Merchant's Wife, another Commission and a third A Girl - I found that Moody's book creates new familiarities and awakens an appetite for further discoveries. It is rich in quotations and commentaries which, situated in a living context, greatly facilitate the reader's access to Pound's poetry.
The photos inside the book are helpful and revealing. I referred to them often as I read. An odd question: what colour is Pound's hair? It appears somewhere in the middle of the book to be a startling red, is sometimes presented as fair or brown and the photos make him look dark-haired.
The photo of Pound on the front cover indicates extreme sensitivity. His face is marked by suffering. It is curiously counterbalanced by Moody's photo on the inside of the back cover, eagerly blowing life into the man-poet through a substantial number of pages!
There are many unforgettable moments, such as when Pound's friend, the non sanguinary Wyndham Lewis, directs his Battery's fire on a hopefully empty church!
I cannot wait for the second volume, yet my impatience is accompanied by some dread, as I understand it leads the reader down into Pound's personal world of mental aberration and distress...
Mary Phil Korsak
The poetry comes first - Rated
The distinctive feature of this fine biography is the way in which Moody places Pound's writing itself to the fore. The structure of the book and the narrative skill are masterly, in that the life is so closely interwoven with the work, that the reader feels the work is the life. Yet this in no way detracts from the riches also explored here of Pound's friendships, social networks and romance. Each chapter is embroidered with the wide-ranging colours of Pound's activities, his thought, and intellectual engagements. Every statement is based on primary material, something written by the poet, or by those close to him; and Moody's use of Pound's own words to support argument, analysis, criticism and commentary is exemplary, for, in the process, he takes care to avoid hypothesis and prejudice, and thus enables the reader to have faith in all he has to say.
Students of Pound's work will find the close reading of the poetry particularly helpful, as there are many helpful pointers to opening up understanding of the texts. The discussion of `Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', for example, is especially revealing. But it is in the analysis of the very early poems that one gets the best sense of the poet apprentice working and refining his craft before he ventures into the great Cantos epic. These poetic experiments offer us the best possible way to comprehend the process by which the young writer became the mature poet.
Ezra Pound: life and poetry - Rated
Moody has written a superb critical biography. He writes in his preface that Pound was in his own way a hero of his culture, a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions. With excellent historical and critical detail Moody reveals, in this first volume of a two-volume work, how the young pound developed into that complex and disruptive genius.
Ezra Pound:Poet combines detailed narrative of Pound's early years with sensitive, nuanced and insightful readings of the poems up to 1920. The commentary is based mainly on primary material whilst also drawing on wide-ranging secondary sources. The extensive notes reveal a tour de force of academic research in the Pound archives.
Moody's clarity of style makes this biography accessible to a wide readership. The book gives us a life of both human comedy and tragic resonance and provides an illuminating account of the poet's career as a radical writer and economic thinker. It offers an impressive and concise analysis of deeply challenging poetic work and a history of literary modernism.
Ezra Pound: Poet is a fascinating account of Pound's life and evolution as a poet and is now and for the future the definitive study in Poundian commentary and criticis.
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