The volcano’s resonant rumble

In the cartoonist Martin Rowson’s comic strip critique-cum-spoof of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound appeared in cameo as ‘Idaho Ez’ — a sort of demented janitor shuffling through the middle of the action, muttering to himself and pushing a broom. This captures, albeit cruelly, a version of the way his reputation survives: opaque, marginal, bonkers — his primary importance in 20th-century poetry if not actually janitorial then that of a curator. The other side of his image, of course, is as a comic turn in the lives of his contemporaries, whether as the loony old anti-Semite in St Elizabeth’s or as the attention-seeking young flâneur described fancifully by Ford Madox Ford:

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.

In this dense and fastidious critical biography, A. David Moody sets out to give his man a fairer crack of the whip than that. He brings both scholarship and good humour to the task, and his first concern is to make sense of Pound’s development as a practitioner. It’s a sober account of the life, spiked with deft judgments and a confident survey of the verse. It has its eccentricities: men are generally called by their surnames and women by their Christian names, and the time scheme’s a bit jumpy. But the result is something handy for academia — it will be read most slowly and profitably by students of the verse — but sprightly enough for the interested non-specialist.

The first half of the book can be heavy sausage, mind you. The problem seems to be that Pound takes about that long to get any good.