Epic reinvented

In Epic Reinvented, Mary Ellis Gibson examines Ezra Pound's Cantos to trace connections between his aesthetics and his politics. She treats little-known and unpublished writings, including many early poems. One substantial poem, "In Praise of the Masters," appears here in print for the first time. Discussing Pound's relationship to his Victorian predecessors, particularly Robert Browning and nineteenth-century historians, Gibson demonstrates how Pound's attempt to write a post-Romantic epic both confronted questions of genre and social order and led to the unpredictabilities of his politics.…