Ezra pound documentary youtube

DOCUMENTARY– Pound’s Reading in Time     
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by Leon Surette 

EZRA POUND’S READING OF MASAI ON PLETHON

We know that Ezra Pound acquired a copy of François Masai’s Pléthon et le Platonisme de Mistra (Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1956) early in 1957, while he was still at St.

Elizabeths, because in February of that year, he wrote to Wyndham Lewis reporting that he had been right “to mention Mr Plethon Gemisto in the Sidg. Canters [Malatesta Cantos]¸ when he wuz less in the pubk eye” (Pound/Lewis 303).

I don’t know that Plethon was much “in the public’s eye” in 1957, but Masai’s book prompted Pound to renew his musings about the neo-platonic ambience that informs the Malatesta cantos¹ – as Peter Liebregts points out in Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (339) – and, indeed, in much of the first thirty cantos.

Plethon makes only a cameo appearance in the first 71 cantos –