When T. S. Eliot originally edited and introduced Pound’s Selected Poems for Faber in 1928 (an edition that remained in print until the 1960s) he included none of the Cantos: the Pound presented by Eliot essentially ended with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley of 1920. It was Pound’s American publisher, James Laughlin, who first attempted to conjoin early poems and later cantos in a single overview, and the 1949 American edition became the portal to Pound for several generations of readers.
This new Faber edition replaces the Faber Selected Poems 1908-1969, and is intended to articulate Pound for the 21st century. Emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of early and late, and of original composition and translation within Pound’s career: including the complete ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ in its original lineation; early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine and the troubadours; and Pound’s late translations of Sophocles, Horace and the Confucian Odes.
As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parcelled out his work to a variety of publishers and journals in England, America, France, and Italy. The edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication: we can thereby observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford’s English Review or Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based Poetry, or acting as an agent provocateur in such avant-garde publications as Blast, the Little Review or the Dial.
Unlike all previous selections, this edition provides annotation to the early poems as well as a commentary on the later Cantos - indispensible to any reader wanting to follow Pound in his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early years of the American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century.