考研英语阅读理解精读100篇(高分版)UNIT 11

 UNIT ELEVEN
 TEXT ONE
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 “WHANG—Boom—Boom—cast delicacy to the winds.” Thus Ezra Pound in a
letter to his father, urging the old man to help promote his first published collection. It
might have been the poet’s manifesto. role as cultural impresario, gave vital impetus
to the literary careers of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce freak and an embarrassment, a
clinical nutcase and vicious anti-Semite who churned out a lot of impenetrable tosh
before losing the plot completely.
 During the second world war he broadcast pro-Fascist radio programmes from Italy
and later avoided trial for treason at home only because he was declared insane. On
his release from St Elizabeth’s Hospital near Washington, DC, he returned to Italy
(“America is a lunatic asylum”), where he died in 1972 aged 87.
 David Moody, emeritus professor of English at York University, makes a strong
case for Pound’s “generous energy” and the “disruptive, regenerative force of his
genius”. His approach (unlike Pound’s) is uncontroversial. He follows the poet’s
progress chronologically from his childhood in Idaho—still, at the time of his birth in
1885, part of the wild west—to his conquest of literary London between 1908 and
1920. He marshals Pound’s staggering output of poetry, prose and correspondence to
excellent effect, and offers clear, perceptive commentary on it. He helps us to see
poems, such as this famous, peculiarly haunting 19-syllable haiku, in a new light:
 The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
 Petals on a wet, black bough.
 That Mr Moody is constantly being upstaged by the subject of his study is not
surprising. Pound was one of the most colourful artistic figures in a period full of
them.
 According to Ford Madox Ford, who became a good friend of Pound’s shortly after
the bumptious young American arrived in London: “Ezra would approach with the
step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear
trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a
Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point and a single
large blue earring.” W.B. Yeats’s simple assessment was that: “There is no younger
generation of poets. E.P. is a solitary volcano.”
 A great merit of Mr Moody’s approach is the space he gives to Pound’s writings. It
is love-it-or-hate-it stuff, but, either way, undeniably fascinating. “All good art is
realism of one kind or another,” Pound said. Reconciling that tidy statement with
practically any of his poems is hard volume ends in 1920, with Pound quitting
London in a huff, finally fed up—after more than a

 decade of doing everything in his powe r to rattle the intellectual
establishment—with “British insensitivity to, and irritation with, mental agility in any
and every form”. His disgraceful radio programmes and the full blooming of his
loopiness lie ahead. So, too, do most of his exquisite Cantos.