Spanning more than three decades of writing, this New Directions selection offers one of the best single-volume introductions to Ezra Pound's poetry, gathering work from Personae, Cathay, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, The Cantos and later poems.

It reveals the extraordinary range of a poet who helped reshaped twentieth-century literature: translating across languages and traditions, drawing on Chinese, Provençal and Classical sources, and forging a modernism built from fragments, history and startling musical precision. Alongside the brilliance sits the inescapable complexity of Pound's politics, making this a collection that is as historically significant as it is aesthetically influential.

Whether read for the crystalline imagism of his early work, the restless experimentation of the middle period, or the dense historical architecture of The Cantos, these poems remain foundational to modern poetry. For readers interested in modernism, translation, literary history or the genealogy of writers from Eliot to Olson, Zukofsky and beyond, Pound remains unavoidable.

New Directions Paperbook, thirteenth printing (1957 edition). General shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to the wrappers with age toning throughout. Binding remains sound and the text is clean.