Marjorie Perloff: Pound Ascendant

But Pound's own poetry contains little of such concrete thing-language and a great deal of verse that looks like this:

Dark eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.

This is the opening stanza of "Dance Figure," which appears, not as we might suppose, in one of the poet's early volumes, but in the post-Cathay, post-Vorticism volume, Lustra. Indeed, such aggressively "modern" epigrams as "The Bath Tub" or "Papyrus," together with those great "Vorticist" poems?"The Game of Chess," "The Coming of War: Acteon," and "Provincia Deserta"?occupy relatively little space in an edition that includes the whole corpus of Pound's poems and translations. After 1917, Pound?s lyric production, most of it translation or adaption, whether of the Noh drama, Cavalcanti, Confucius, or Sophocles, oddly becomes less rather than more imagistic, Vorticist, or ideogrammatic. And this corpus takes up approximately three quarters of the Library of America volume.