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TEXT ONE 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 poets manifesto. Pound is as divisive a figure today as he was in his own lifetime. For some he was the leading figure of the Modernist movement who redefined what poetry was and could be; and who, in his role as cultural impresario, gave vital impetus to the literary careers of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, among others. But for many Pound remains a 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 Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, he returned to Italy , where he died in 1972 aged 87. David Moody, emeritus professor of English at York University, makes a strong case for Pounds generous energy and the disruptive, regenerative force of his genius . His approach is uncontroversial. He follows the poets 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 Pounds 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: | 
