Exultations

In these early poems, Ezra Pound already burns with the fire that would consume modern poetry. Written in 1909, Exultations captures a young poet in transit between the romantic inheritances of the nineteenth century and the revolutionary brevity of Imagism yet to come. Here are love's passionate sorrows rendered with startling directness; here is Columbus, that Admiral of history, reimagined as both visionary and fool; here is the medieval troubadour Bertrans de Born speaking from across centuries. Pound moves between forms, the tight constraints of the sestina and the liberating freedom of unmoored verse, as if testing every available vessel to carry his intensities. The collection pulses with war's strange thrill and beauty's sharper edge. These are poems written by someone who believed poetry could remake the world's seeing, who reached back to the troubadours and classical innovators even as he pushed toward something entirely new. Not every poem reaches the crystalline precision of his later work, but the ambition crackles on every page. For readers who want to witness a major voice finding itself, these poems offer something rare: the sight of mastery in the process of becoming.