Poems 1918-21, Including Three Portraits and Four Cantos

This is Pound at his most electrifying: a collection forged in the aftermath of the Great War, when everything traditional had collapsed and the poet's task was to rebuild from rubble. The volume gathers his breakthrough work from 1918-21, including the devastating "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," a bitter elegy for a generation that traded beauty for commerce, and the firstFour Cantos that would become the spine of his lifelong masterwork. Here too is the audacious "Homage to Sextus Propertius," where Pound resurrects a Roman poet to speak modern truths about love, war, and the function of art. The "Three Portraits" offer compressed brilliance: surgical sketches of historical figures rendered in Pound's crystalline, imagist precision. These poems don't mourn the old world so much as dissect it, finding in classical fragments the only solid ground left standing. For anyone wanting to understand how modernism became modern, this is where Pound set the terms.