The idea behind this collection of essays, by eight American scholars of modernist poetics, is to situate Pound “in ways that help us reimagine his work while simultaneously suggesting how that work might help us reimagine our present moment” (viii). Charles Altieri considers “why Pound's Imagist poems still matter” in the context of the present state of poetry in the United States (3). The latter he finds thriving, but to a considerable degree limited to the immediacies of sensation and thus risking “a radical splitting off of private sensibility from concerns for public welfare” (7). Altieri finds in Pound's poetic method an antidote to that. By subtle and penetrating analysis and comparison of “The Return” (1913) and other poems, he reveals the methods by which the “composing intelligence” (8) at work in them moves beyond immediate observation and sensation to direct attention to the relations between the things observed, and so creates complex impersonal states of mind and feeling in which private emotion can become a public force.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, in a closely argued and comprehensively informed essay, finds in the “modernist palimpsest” of Pound's Cantos, and in his concept of a globalized culture, a promising solution to the present crisis of “comparative literature”, and/or “world literature” (113). “Those who decide to stay as ‘readers’ [of the Cantos]”, Rabaté writes, “agree to be enlisted in an educational process that will lead them to read unknown classics and listen to contemporary conversations differently” (112). Two qualities in particular render Pound's work exemplary: his close engagement with the material conditions, social, economic, and political, of the literatures and cultures he enters into, and his seeking always the best that has been achieved in the past as instigation to better writing and better living in the present.

Christine Froula's essay is a wide-ranging meditation in which the Cantos, and in particular the Pisan Cantos, are “Whirled into the vortex of twentieth-century history” and caught up in its ungraspable wars and devastations (136). “Pound's epic mirrors the violence which shipwrecks it” (144), she writes, and concludes that the “moral failures” of the Pisan Cantos are the contemporary world's failures. That conclusion comes in the course of six pages all about the Katyn massacre and what Pound did not make of it, and what the several world powers did not make of it. It is a serious and compelling argument, yet it must be said that it rather takes off at tangents into its own extrinsic concerns, and doesn't engage at all with the constructive work of the composing intelligence in those cantos, and specifically with its drive to conceive a nonviolent economic and social order.

Josephine Park thinks that Pound misunderstood and did not follow Fenollosa's principle of the ideogram, and that in consequence the China Cantos amount to no more than a transcription of data or “titbits” (33). In her determination to align Pound with the new idea of a data-driven “digital humanities,” she completely elides his interpretive making, his selection and arrangement of the given material to effect a swift perception of relations. Aaron Jaffe's “Paleotithic Media” begins in highflown academic jargon: “This chapter claims that the puzzling and often overlooked Twelfth Canto is important evidence for understanding Ezra Pound as a deep time media-theoretical thinker” (45). His chapter comes down to this blunt set of trigger warnings inviting offense rather than understanding, “It contains specimens of … toxic racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny” (62). Christopher Bush is informed and intelligent about Fenollosa's and Pound's ideas of East–West relations, and about the significance of the Japanese Noh for Pound's epic; but then he has Pound “embrace … Japanese fascism” and there is no help to be had from him after that (97). In an entirely theorized and generalized argument about “value” in which there is much one might question, Paul Stasi follows Park in declaring the China/Adams cantos not an original composition and so “fundamentally anti-aesthetic” (199). In the Pisan Cantos, on the other hand, there is a return to “the lyric subject,” which makes them, Stasi writes, “lovely, in all their individualist, unapologetic, fascist glory” (199). In the final chapter, C. D. Blanton parallels Froula in finding Pound's relevance in his failure, and follows Park in connecting that failure with his abandonment of ideogrammic particularity. His own method pursues the logic of highly rarefied and tendentious theoretic abstractions by which he finds Pound wrong, wrong, wrong, at every turn. He concludes that Pound so little understood what he was doing that his poetry fell into the same order of abstraction as the usurious capitalism he thought to oppose.

Two gratuitous and erroneous footnotes might indicate a prevalent attitude. Jaffe declares that Pound only began to use “Roman” numerals when he “embraced fascism” (50 n. 14). Not true. Stasi asserts that “there is no historical evidence that Palmerston [“began draining swamps in Sligo”]. Mussolini did, however, a fact Pound loved to repeat. Palmerston is thus … a cipher for Il Duce” (185 n. 21). For the evidence see Paideuma, 25, 1–2 (1996), 229–30.