'Ezra Pound In His Time and Beyond'

Ezra Pound was a lot of things: Ex-patriot American, economist, musician, critic, translator from the Chinese, Fascist propagandist and an anti-Semite. Or maybe not.

But most of all, Pound was a towering figure in 20th century poetry who kickstarted the modernist movement and nurtured an extraordinary number of important writers, including Eliot, Cummings, Joyce, Frost and Hemingway.

The University Delaware Library in Newark, Del., USA, has one of the finest Pound collections extant, and a goodly number of gems from it are on view in "Ezra Pound In His Time and Beyond," an exhibition that runs through June.

The exhibition catalog is online if you'd like to take a peek.

While we're being literary, much of Delaware's collection came from Robert Wilson, longtime proprietor of the legendary Phoenix bookstore in Greenwich Village.

Wilson was on campus for the exhibition opening and told a drop-dead wonderful story involving some long lost manuscripts by William Faulkner, the great American fiction writer and Nobel laureate. See my March 7 post on A Story About Bill (Faulkner) for Wilson's yarn