The complex twists and turns of Pound's evolving, and often contradictory, visual aesthetic have rarely attracted such rich attention as in the meticulous and insightful scholarship that we have here. The genealogy traced by Rebecca Beasley is from the ambition of the final passage of “Three Cantos, I” (“If for a year a man write to paint”) to the recognition, from the mid-1920s, that “the visual arts function in Pound's oeuvre less as inspiration than as illustration” (206). The change achieves its most focussed form with the move to Paris (as is so often the case) and the encounter with Dada and an increasing sense of art's social responsibilities. Pound's battle begins with his antipathy to philology and his preference for a visual criticism as opposed to a verbal critique which marks a claim for an aesthetic of beauty in distinction from the tyranny of the lexical, but Beasley understands that the two are not so easily disentangled. In a particularly expressive detail, Pound's first critical act (an essay on Latin poetry in Book News Monthly of 1906) occurs in the journal founded by John Wanamaker, “America's most influential merchant of the early twentieth century” (11–12) and founder of Philadelphia's first department store, which unusually relied upon aesthetic presentation for the sale of its goods. Here philology is allied to forms of specialization themselves bound up with scientific method and the technology of the marketplace, and aestheticism's counter is to replace utility (and words) with beauty (and the visual). The paradox recognized at this early stage provides the ground for one of the major Poundian confusions:

The crux here is the shift of attention from the artwork itself to its informing intelligence, where, influenced by Leger, beauty becomes coextensive with utility and the “beauty and utility of the machine is testimony to the process of intelligent thinking that produced it” (190). From this standpoint it is, of course, but a short step to the political importance of a cultural elite – or, in aesthetic terms, the move from an admiration for the provisory quality of the Whistlerian “key” (promising openness as a resistance to commodification's enclosure) to an equal admiration for the unfinished nature of Malatesta's church at San Francesco, “evidence of Siginmondo's force of character and his ability to establish conditions that enable artistic creation” (196). Beasley's charting of Pound's visual engagements from the early poetry to the 1920s, aided by enormously impressive excavations from the archives, tells the story also of the embeddedness of those engagements with the increasing “miscalculation” of his politics in subtle and entirely fresh ways. Hers is an outstanding achievement.