The Music (Yes, Music) Of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was off his rocker, of course. It’s part of what made him such a great poet. That unhinged quality is also what makes his forays into the world of music simultaneously unsettling and fascinating, says Richard Taruskin. “He loved playing the fool, describing his aesthetic theories, the authentic fruit of his genius, in a semiliterate patois familiar to anyone who has read his letters or scanned the titles of his essays. And those theories drove him to compose music despite a confessed inability — vouched for by his fellow poets William Carlos Williams and W. B. Yeats, among others — to carry a tune.”