Ezra Pound torna a parlare all'Italia

The essay deals with the reception of Ezra Pound’s poetic work in Italy tracing it back to the 1930s when, some years after his move to Rapallo, he fostered an international cultural debate through his “critical” writings in important literary journals. During that decade, though he was widely known as “il poeta americano”, Pound was arguably better known as a literary critic, editor of Cavalcanti, economist, concert impresario and man of action than as a poet. Indeed, this was a crucial decade for Pound’s aesthetic influence on Italian culture as regards both literature and literary criticism. However, contemporary Italian poets like Marinetti and Ungaretti simply had exchanges with Pound on the influence of Futurism and the avant-garde in general. Pound’s deep influence was brought about by Rizzardi’s translation of the Pisan Cantos published in 1951 and reviewed by Montale (1953) and Sanguineti (1954), along with the monographic volume, Pound Symposium, which the Italian literary journal “Nuova Corrente” devoted to the poet in 1955. Then, the essay focuses on contemporary Italian studies on Pound attested at the last international conference, held in 2015 at Brunnenburg, Italy, where he returned to stay temporarily at his daughter’s after his confinement in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in America.