Contents

Theme and Action     1
Steep Trajectories     13
A West Riding Boyhood     18
Talking with Millicent Dillon     27
Go Home, Octavio Paz!     49
Art and Anger     52
The Life of Dylan Thomas     63
John Berryman's Freedom of the Poet     66
Lowell's Selected Poems     74
George Steiner on Language     80
Six Notes on Ezra Pound     95

Ezra among the Edwardians     95
Ezra Pound Abandons the English     114
Pound and The Exile     128
Sicily in The Cantos     133
Two Kinds of Magnanimity     143
Ezra Pound and the English     150

A Fascist Poem: Yeats's "Blood and the Moon"     165
John Peck's Shagbark     174
American Literature: The Canon     179
Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse     199
Talking with Dana Gioia     203