Ezra Pound

Lustra Ezra Pound

Certain of the poems in Lustra have offended admirers of the verse of the Personae period. When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding. They do not like that constant readjustment which the following of Mr. Pound's work demands. Thus has Lustra been a disappointment to some; though it manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the Contemporanea) are a more direct statement of views than Pound's verse had ever given before. T. S. Eliot "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry