Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound!
By A. David Moody
[Pound] was going back to his old master not so much to learn as to argue with him and assert his independence. He was taking Browning’s Sordello as a point of departure for his cantos, as ‘the thing to go on from’. He had to start there because he thought it ‘the best long poem in English since Chaucer’, and the only one with a ‘live form’. But that form was not right for what he had to do, and he would be finding his own in breaking free from Browning’s.